Entries Tagged 'publishing' ↓

Jeff Bezos has been hyping the Kindle all over the place, and I make it a point not to buy any hype at all. None. Whatsoever. This guy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation isn’t buying Bezos’s hype, either. But it doesn’t prevent him from speculating about the imminent digital revolution in books suggested by a successful wireless device that stores lots and lots and lots of text.

And he’s got a good list of questions for the folks in the book industry to ponder:

• Will e-book readers be open to content from any source?
  So far, it looks like Amazon’s Kindle is limited in the type of file it can read. PDF files, for example, have to be converted before the Kindle can read them (whereas Sony’s reader can handle any type of file). Worse, books downloaded from Amazon appear in a proprietary .azw file format, which can’t be read on other devices. (The Kindle also bizarrely charges users $1 for each blog or RSS feed they subscribe to.) And if you’re trying to read digitally from Canada, you’re out of luck. Users should be able to seamlessly move content from their e-book reader to their computer to their cell phone. The winner of the format wars to come will be the one that can provides the greatest interoperability.
• Will digital books carry DRM?
  After insisting on dysfunctional copy protection for years, the music industry has finally realized that DRM doesn’t work. By making legitimately paid content harder to use than content downloaded for free, DRM punishes paying customers by locking up their content. And, since DRM is always circumvented eventually, it does nothing to prevent piracy (the Kindle’s DRM has already been cracked). Sellers of digital books and the makers of reading devices can save themselves — and their customers — ongoing headaches by avoiding these attempts to restrict customer rights to their content now.
• Will the first sale doctrine still apply when books are digital?
  Book readers are accustomed to passing their dog-eared copies of books without thinking about it. In the world of physical books, the first sale doctrine says that a book buyer can transfer the book by loaning, re-selling it, or even renting it out if they like, without infringing on the publisher’s rights. What happens when sharing a book with a friend means making an additional, perfect copy? Readers should not be asked to give up their first sale rights, whether their books are digital or made out of paper.
• Will libraries carry digital books?
  Libraries loan out a limited number of copies of new books for free, and publishers don’t complain. But what happens when the number of books on loan is unlimited, and the “loan” makes a perfect copy? Libraries should maintain the right to distribute books, even when books are digital.
• Will bookstores survive the shift in technology?
  Bookstores have always played an important role as community meeting places and as curators of our literary culture. But even great bookstores, such as Berkeley’s Cody’s Books, have been closing or are struggling as more people get their content instantly over the web. Bookstores must find a way to interact with digital content and monetize a broader range of goods and services that come attached to “book culture,” or they may end up suffering the same fate as the music stores that are rapidly going out of business.
• Will publishers be open to new business models?
  The music industry tried putting their heads in the sand and hoping digital music would go away, and it didn’t work. Now, the major labels are (belatedly) experimenting with a number of delivery options for music, from online radio to subscription services to pay-what-you-like downloads. Book publishers should learn from their friends in the music industry and move aggressively to try out new models.

Good questions all, but I doubt that anyone in the industry has the time to ponder them.

And while publishers are getting pummeled by the digital revolutionaries into thinking about what format to deliver their “content” in, Sarah Lacy, writing in BusinessWeek, has ideas for them about how to market their “product” in a Web 2.0 world.

Some of them make sense. But this one is just revolting:

Create stars—don’t just exploit existing ones.
When an author is established, publishers have to do less to make a book sell. So bidding wars start. As a result, even some best-sellers aren’t very profitable.

Instead, publishers should take a page from the handbook of Gawker founder Nick Denton and create stars. Find micro-celebs with a voice, talent, a niche base of readers, and most important—enthusiasm. Then leverage the publisher’s brand (and the techniques I advocate, of course) to blow them out.

Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter.

At the risk of sounding like a lit snob … are you fucking kidding me?

In the rush to announce the success of the Kindle, Jeff Bezos somehow failed to note that print-on-demand is sneaking around behind his back.

The Espresso Book Machine—which I’ve written about before—makes its debut in 50 stores across Britain soon:

Blackwell bookshop announced yesterday that it is to install an “Espresso Book Machine” that will allow customers to print out a novel in just seven minutes.

The self-service machine, which will eventually be installed in 50 stores across the country, offers a choice of around one million titles. The fully-bound books are printed to library quality, including a front cover.

A more sophisticated version of the machine is smaller and prints books in just three minutes. The older version has already been installed in 11 sites worldwide and Blackwell hopes to eventually have the faster machine in its stores.

Britain’s book industry has hailed the machine’s arrival as potentially revolutionary. It means high street bookshops can offer a range of books that will compete for the first time with online stores such as Amazon.

Blackwell is leasing the book-making machine from its American owner, On Demand Books, according to The Bookseller. Vince Gunn, chief executive of Blackwell, described the technology as “trailblazing”.

This is good news for those of us who like paper books, and a deep backlist of titles available at the press of a finger.

All hail Jason Epstein, the brains behind this innovation.

[updated (twice) with some missing links]

As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.

But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).

Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.

Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).

Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.

So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***

[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.

For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.

And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:

If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.

So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)

Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).

Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:

• Nick Denton at 01:20 PM on 06/05/08

  Connectedness Index: 1764

  @Choire: The entangling of literary, journalistic and romantic relationships is a topic worthy of Gawker. You can’t understand how the media works unless you know who dated whom. Every job, every magazine commission, every anonymous quote, every resentment-they can only be fully understood if you know that X went to school with Y who introduced them to Z who commissioned X to write that magazine piece which turned into a book contract lined up by Y’s former lover. When you and I chat over lunch, that’s how we talk. Why should all this information be reserved for the private conversations of media insiders? That’s why Gawker exists: to put all of that invaluable social information out on the web and make the media machine a little less monolithic and intimidating than it can so often seem.

Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

Here:

[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

And here:

[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:

For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.

But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.

It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:

something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:

Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.

“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”

The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.

For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:

Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.

And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he's referring to this "review" ---ed.]

Interesting times indeed.

update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.

Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.” 

———————–

*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos thinks he’s got a hit on his hands in the Kindle:

Is the Kindle about to catch fire?

Could Amazon.com’s seven-month-old wireless e-book reader – a rectangular wonder in antique iPod white, able to download any of 125,000 books adapted to its format – be the tipping point that marks the decline and fall of the paper book? …

The balding, blue-jeaned corporate dynamo – now a 44-year-old father of four who kept his empire healthy through the dot-com disasters – did everything possible to suggest the answers were an almost Joycean yes, yes, and yes again.

And he’s none too sad to see the end of publishing as we know it, or the back of publishers, either:

To Kindle doubters, Bezos got off one subtle jab about book-industry know-it-alls.

He recalled when he started his groundbreaking company 14 years ago. “The more you knew about the book industry,” he observed with a bright smile, “the less likely you were to invest in Amazon.”

This is true: the know-it-alls were in denial, and the book industry as we know it will change under the pressures of the new technology as more and more people will want this new gadget.

I predicted in December 2007, when it was released, that the Kindle would catch on. Sadly, I didn’t invest in Amazon (I wasn’t much of an investor, or I would have). But I know one wise man in publishing who bucked the trend and did—to the ridicule, and later the envy, of his colleagues.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

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.

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!

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,

At the Corner,Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg, whose book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than ten weeks, gives a lively account of the ups and downs [e.a.]:

The most plausible explanation [for the books slide from the top 10] is the same one that explained why I leaped onto the Times list my first week out of the box. After all I opened at #10 even though I had a small first printing and it was hard to find the book in many stores. No one — except the Times itself — really understands how their formula works. But it definitely measures demand, perhaps not as much as sales, but enough to launch a book to the list if the demand is intense. In other words, the rate of sales — and presales — at all levels of the market (stores, clubs, wholesale etc.) are part of the formula. This week a whole slew of new books with big promotion budgets came online and the cross platform demand apparently shoved LF downward.

That’s an interesting perspective on the factors involved in achieving bestsellerdom on the New York Times lists, a mysterious process that was also mined last October by the NYT’s public editor, Clark Hoyt.

Goldberg also talks about how it feels to have written this book:

Obviously, I’d like to stay on the list as long as possible. …And it annoys all the right people the longer I’m on it, of course. … Three months on the NYT list — and hitting #1 — plus a dozen printings is far better than I dared hope. And yet I still hope the book does even better and has a wider following.

Son, you hit the lottery. STFU.

Are you surprised that publishers sign up books (including fake memoirs) that they think the public will buy? Chris Lemann is shocked, shocked:

How can editors–let alone readers–reasonably expect to encounter anything resembling “the truth” on a printed page, anyway? …

As observers fret over how it is that a major house like Riverhead could be gulled by a scheming prevaricator, it seems at least as worthwhile to ask what makes fictions such as Love and Consequences so compelling to publishing professionals in the first place.

The market, dear Sherlock, the market. Dysfunction sells! And the more dysfunctional you start out and the grander your arc into respectability (and a book contract!), the more delectable your story seems.

I wrote about the latest inauthenticity scandal here, where I noted:

Why does this keep happening? Because mundus vult decipi: people want to be deceived. …

In this particular case of the faked memoir, sophisticated readers—including agents, editors, copy editors, lawyers, and highly qualified reviewers—wanted to believe (no matter how unlikely it is) that a former fringe-dweller in American society is also very, very gifted author.

See? It’s not that complicated. The story of how the New York Times got fooled is an even more interesting one:

WITH a few computer keystrokes last week at my request, Jack Begg, the supervisor of newsroom research at The Times, showed me that there was no record of a Margaret B. Jones in Eugene, Ore. With a few more keystrokes, he brought up property records showing that the house Jones said she owned was bought by Margaret Seltzer and another person in 2000 and now belongs to Stuart and Gay Seltzer after an “intrafamily transaction.”

All of this should have been a huge red flag about Margaret B. Jones, the author of a memoir in which she said she was abused, taken from her family at age 5 and shuttled between foster homes for three years before winding up in a world of gangs, violence and drugs in South-Central Los Angeles.

The book, “Love and Consequences,” was a fake, and had Begg been asked to do five minutes of checking in readily available public records, or had reporters and editors done it themselves before the newspaper bit, The Times could have been spared the embarrassment of falling for yet another too-good-to-be-true memoir from a publishing industry unwilling to accept responsibility for separating fact from fiction.

By the time Begg did any checking, The Times had been taken in, as had National Public Radio, The Los Angeles Times and other news organizations.

Caveat lector! (And enjoy the ride!)

That’s my best guess, anyway, after reading this item at Publishers Lunch ($$):

How Many More eBook Releases Will We See?

The press release from Ectaco draws on a variety of cliches (”kiss your
old-fashioned, dusty library goodbye”) to announce the company’s new jetBook ereader. The cheap-looking device weighs just 7 ounces and has a five-inch screen (smaller than Kindle and Sony Reader) and appears to handle only .txt, .pdf and .jpg text files, along with mp3s. The company specializes in translation dictionaries and those are a focus feature of this device as well, which sells for $350.

Mostly you look at their site and realize how relatively easy it must be to design and produce a reader like this, and how many similar products must be on the way.

Duh.

From the press release:

jetBook(R) is an incredibly sophisticated e-book reader with a built-in
mp3 player that allows users to listen to AudioBooks as well as keep up
with their reading. Preloaded with translating dictionaries, you can
simultaneously enjoy a good book, improve your vocabulary by looking up and
translating any words you want, listen to your favorite audio files and
check out photos — all in the same device! With an incredibly simple to
read, large 5-inch, high-resolution display that is easy on the eyes, users
can now read for hours without the eyestrain that comes from ordinary
computer screens. And those with trouble reading normal-sized print books
will benefit from the different fonts and sizes you can change to
instantly. Weighing in at a remarkable 7 ounces, the super-slim device fits
easily in the palm of your hand for a truly comfortable reading experience.

I don’t yet own an e-book reader. (I don’t have a commute, so there’s no urgency. I’m waiting for early adopters to test them out and to advise me on which one to buy.)

My motto, however, is: if you love books, set them free^TM.

The last time I urged book lovers and book cultists to embrace the technological revolution was here.

What do you do if you’re a young writer facing a future in which the book is not a treasured cultural product? You become an explorer, a pioneer, an experimenter, and a partner with a traditional publisher, and you move into the unknown:

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

Read about it here, in the Guardian.

Among the freedoms our Constitution guarantees is the right to think—and even to promote—poisonous ideas about America and about history.

The novelist Nicholson Baker takes his freedom seriously, as Adam Kirsh, writing in the New York Sun, notes:

Mr. Baker’s book is designed to convince the reader that America should not have fought Germany or Japan; that Franklin Roosevelt connived to get us into the war at the behest of the arms manufacturers, and probably knew about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in advance; that Winston Churchill was a bloodthirsty buffoon and a protofascist; that in Japan’s invasion of China, China was the aggressor; that after the fall of France, Churchill was culpable in vowing to fight on, and not acceding to Hitler’s “peace” terms; that the Holocaust was, at least in part, Hitler’s response to British aggression, and that the only people who demonstrated true wisdom in the run-up to the war were American and British pacifists, who refused to take up arms no matter how pressing the need.

“Was the war necessary?” Mr. Baker asks in his author’s note. “Was it a ‘good war’? Did waging it help anyone who needed help? These were the basic questions that I hoped to answer when I began writing.”

Baker’s previous book contemplated whether or not it was morally acceptable to assassinate George W. Bush. No word on whether he’s got a contract for a new book.

Here’s one publisher who knows the score:

The free-thinking reader is not dead, but found online

As most book publishers bow to bestsellers and celebrity culture, serious literature can still thrive thanks to the internet

Read the whole thing.

First, Vanity Fair canceled its annual Oscar bash. Now one division of HarperCollins is asking its expense account owners to cut back on T&E:

When editors go out to lunch with an author or a literary agent, they’re expected to pick up the check. What to do, then, when your employer has told you that you’re not allowed to? That’s what’s happening this month over at the flagship imprint of HarperCollins, where Jonathan Burnham has instructed his staff to “halt all [travel and expenses spending, known as T&E] for the entire month of March.”

In a memo sent to the imprint’s editors a little over a month ago and obtained by The Observer, Mr. Burnham indicated that he had to implement the measure because the house’s T&E budget for fiscal year 2008 was “already dangerously overspent.”

It’s not that they’ll never eat lunch in this town again, though. Graciously, agents are coming to the “rescue.”

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.

Sticking a toe in the Web’s water, book publishing giant HarperCollins starts to offer some of its content free, in the hope of enticing people to buy books:

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”

Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

HarperCollins also plans to upload a different title by Mr. Coelho each month for the rest of the year.

I’ve been listening to the give-it-away-free gospel for a while now.  Unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury, I wouldn’t say it’s unavoidable. And of course I wouldn’t want to draw any parallels here—I’m only making a lame joke.

But I think this is a step in the right direction: namely, into an embrace by the oldest of old media of the brave new media world. The future of books (whatever form they take and whatever platform they’re offered on)—and the future of stories and narrative and of all written “content”—is very bright. We’ve just got to move forward to meet it.

Bravo.

Sluggish times lead to …successful innovation! creativity! new ideas! weird new ideas!

I’m glad Jennifer Schuessler brought this up: The continued hang-wringing about the death of reading is driving me batty. Stop! 

Schuessler notes a great contribution to the Stop the Death-of-Reading Hysterics Club [e.a.]:

[T]he novelist Ursula Le Guin joins the fray with an elegant, wide-ranging essay aimed at deflating the N.E.A.’s alarmism (subscription required). The “hedonists” who love to disappear into serious books have been a minority in every age, Le Guin argues. What is falling by the wayside in our own time is social reading—the kind we do in order to be able to have “nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversations” with casual acquaintances. In 1841, strangers on the train could chat about whether Little Nell was going to be written out of Dicken’s latest serial. Today, we huddle by the water cooler debating whether Tony Soprano got whacked.

LeGuin correctly notes that our taste for stories hasn’t vanished. Our means of telling and communicating stories is evolving, along with our technology and our modern and ever-evolving way of life.

While that happens … at a glacial pace, all you book people: chill! 

Lots and lots of people read! They even buy books!
Serve the audience you have.

Janet Maslin launched a broadside against publishers the other day.

As it becomes possible to rush books into print ever more hastily, editing ain’t what it used to be.

Though there are many candidates for the honor of Year’s Sloppiest Book, the wall-to-wall bloopers in “Pearl Harbor,” a novel by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forschten, warrant special “wretching noises” from us all. The books that follow, in alphabetical order by author, were, in the “Pearl Harbor” vernacular, “all ladened with” better things.

Too bad the Times buried Maslin’s criticism where it will easily go unnoticed.

Bottom line: As long as there are no consequences in the marketplace, publishers will continue to put out books that are full of errors.

I love GalleyCat, but the whiny editors and agents who’ve been writing in to bitch and moan about the publishing business haven’t taught me (or GalleyCat blogger Ron Hogan, as he notes) a thing. Anyone who’s really interested and has a good half hour or so to devote to the subject can delve deep into the reeds by reading recent interviews with two very knowledgeable players.

First up, Andrew Wylie, profiled in Portfolio:

New York literary agent Andrew Wylie seems perfectly happy to be known as “the Jackal”—the nickname that sticks even though he obtained it years ago in Britain during a publishing dustup whose baroque details have largely faded from memory. He’s equally unruffled when book editors and rival agents call him an “evil madman,” a “cold-eyed predator,” and a “monster.”

Much more interesting, detailed, and revealing is this interview with longtime agent Lynn Nesbit. Here are a few highlights:

On book people:

So you miss the personalities

Yes. I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], “You missed the good days.” When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who’s now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who’s also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I’ll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.

So why was that lost?
It’s the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn’t attract eccentrics anymore.

On competition:

You represent so many of the original New Journalists. What was it like to be at the center of a movement like that?
When I first represented Tom Wolfe, I was younger than Tom. I was a kid. And when I went to sell Tom’s first book, his editor, Clay Felker, was the most important magazine editor in New York. I sent Tom’s book out for auction. Viking, with whom Clay had an arrangement as sort of editor at large, brought Tom in for a meeting with Tom Guinzburg. But on the auction day, Viking didn’t bid. So I thought that was curious. But they didn’t, and the book went to FSG.

A few days later I went to this big literary party at Rust Hills’s. I will never forget walking in. It was jammed with every writer and editor in New York. Clay was then dating Gloria Steinem, and Clay walked right over to me—this is like two days after the Tom thing—and he said, “You fucking cunt.” …

On editorial intervention:

How do you see your principal roles and responsibilities as an agent? Have they changed over time?
You are part of a writer’s support system—a very important part. The role of the agent is more important today than it was when I was starting out. Because the publishing world is so corporate, and editors move around so much, you are increasingly the only fixed point for the writer. That’s one way it’s changed. Another thing that I notice here, with younger agents like Tina and Eric, is that they do a lot of editing, and we didn’t do that when we were young. I think it’s partly because of the editors. There is such pressure on editors to come in with something that’s almost ready to go that the agents are assuming part of what the editors used to do.

When did you start to recognize that as a phenomenon?
Probably just in the last [eight?] years, or ten years.

Did you ever edit?
Not to the extent that they do.

On replenishing the ranks of book publishing people:

In terms of the book industry itself, what would you say are the most troubling or frustrating changes today?
What worries me is that there aren’t as many younger people who want to become editors as there used to be. Because at a certain point they get frustrated. There’s not enough money to make the job palatable, and they don’t have enough freedom. So they feel that they have this corporate bureaucracy imposed on them and yet they’re not making a decent enough salary. What I see is this flow of young editors becoming agents. There are hundreds of agents. I can’t believe how many there are. When I was starting out, there were agents, but not at the number there are now. Because today they can operate out of their apartments with a telephone. Or they think they can.

On the biggest problem facing the business today:

What is the single biggest problem with the book world today?
Distribution. Especially for smaller books. Because the bookstores won’t take a chance. And if a writer has a not-so-rosy track record, then they won’t order more and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, if the book happens to get good reviews, you’re caught out of print and have to reprint and maybe the books don’t get to the stores fast enough. And distribution is a problem on the other end, too, with books that are overprinted, books that may get on the best-seller list. It may look good to the outside world, but the returns may negate the rosy picture.

On editors’ nerves about buying fiction:

What do you mean exactly by “nervous”?
Nervous that fiction is very difficult to sell. An editor wants to see something that’s more near completion, that the idea or the thrust behind a novel is more fully realized. Twenty-five years ago an editor would say, “Oh, this has promise,” and sign it up. Today, editors want to say no rather than yes. Unless they see it as a big book.

And this is because of corporate pressures? Profit pressures?
Profit pressures. You must know that fiction is very hard to sell. Today it’s almost that fiction needs to seem like it’s going to be an event. It almost has to open like a movie, on the commercial side, or else the editor has to be convinced its going to get such praise, such positive literary acclaim, that even if it doesn’t sell a lot you’re launching a real voice.

On losing readers (as a function of the culture, not as a function of lousy book marketing):

What other changes are you seeing?
I said this earlier as sort of a joke, but I’m beginning to think there are more writers than readers. I get these e-mails pouring in from people who want to write their life stories. It’s because of the memoir. Everybody thinks they have a story. I also feel there are fewer and fewer civilians—I mean people outside of our business—who I meet who have time to read. They all say, “I’d love to read, but I’m just too busy.” What worries me is that people are on blogs, Web sites—there is a lot of that going on—but they aren’t reading books. That phenomenon, to me, is not a product of the industry, it’s a product of how our culture is changing. People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. And everybody has their specialty. I don’t ever look at blogs or Web sites because I would never get anything done. I’m tempted to because I hear about these great things.

On the future of books [e.a.]:

A lot of people seem to think an iPod-like device will come along for books….
Great. That would be terrific. I have no problem with that. The more forms in which people can read intellectual content, the better. I don’t care if they read it in a real book or on an iPod. If they’re more likely to read it on some device, great. I have no fear about that. I have no idea why people do. It’s the content that matters, the intellectual content. As long as we can keep it copyrighted. I also look forward to books on demand. Jason Epstein*** has been working on this machine for years, and he tells me that other people have been trying to do it too. The modes of distribution are so antiquated.

Epstein also seems to think that publishers are getting too big and will eventually collapse from their own bigness and fracture into smaller shops.
Like what’s happened in Hollywood. I think it will happen. I think it’s happening now, with all these imprints. There are so many imprints. And once they get the distribution figured out…. If these machines really do become effective, and there are more efficient ways of distributing books, then I think there will be more and more independent producers. And independent producers use a distribution outlet. So the publishers will be more like distributors. I think it could happen. I don’t know because this business is so primitive—the publishing business—so unsophisticated. It takes so many years to make a change here …

Well worth reading.

——–
*** Longtime readers will remember that I have written about Jason Epstein and his print-on-demand enterprise several times.

Via Ron Hogan at GalleyCat, I just heard about DailyLit.

What an amazingly great idea! You want to read a public domain classic (and a growing list of copyrighted works)? Sign up and get an e-mail a day (or an RSS feed) and read your book in byte-size installments.

Read all about the various ways to make this simple, free service work for you. (You don’t have to wait till the next day to read the next installment if you just can’t wait.) I’m signing up right now to get The Education of Henry Adams, starting tomorrow, in 197 parts!

Really, I think this is genius—not so much because it will be self-sustaining (I can’t see reading this way for many consecutive books … though, who knows? I haven’t even tried it yet—and, like every other lit snot, I was certainly wrong about audiobooks: I thought the idea was ridiculous, and it’s a huge part of the book business) but rather because it will certainly reignite people’s passion for reading in long form—as in, you know, real books.

At the same time, it enables those who love to read but really can’t spare the time (say, a presidential candidate or a neurosurgeon at a teaching hospital or a traffic controller or a law clerk or nurse on 12-hour shifts) to get their fix and reconnect with their passion.

Kudos.

It’s in this spirit that I embrace digitization. Again:

if you want to save books, set them free

As Spengler said in quite a different context the other day: when nothing works, you try everything.

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.

Peter Osnos, publisher of Public Affairs and director of the multi-platform publishing project Caravan (who, coincidentally, is also Scott McLellan’s editor and who I mentioned here in that regard, and obviously a very industrious guy) sings its praises here. [e.a.]

Now comes the Kindle, Amazon’s device for wireless reading that makes it possible to carry an entire library in a machine the size of a paperback. I ordered one on the day it was released at the high price of $399. It arrived two days later, and within minutes I was settled in an easy-chair downloading and reading David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, which I had bought for $9.99, less than a third of its list price for the printed version. … There will be a great many people who conclude that they only way they really enjoy a book is holding the printed pages in their hand, but for those who choose a machine (like those who have switched over time to MP3s from Hi-Fi, and to DVDs from the big screen), the Kindle is a major breakthrough.

A colleague will be pleased to note the device’s usefulness to publishing professionals:

As an editor, I was especially interested in the promise of downloading documents and manuscripts from my computer so I could read them and take notes without hauling wheelbarrows full of paper.

Alas, Osnos’s path to setting up the damn thing wasn’t obstacle-free. Read about it here. But read it!

I think it was a year and a half ago 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.

But I’m even more pleased to note a certain buzz around books that I haven’t picked up in a good long while. This one even made it into the news pages of the New York Times.

Maybe by coincidence, I’ve noted a mini-trend among the twentysomethings of my own acquaintance (not a scientific sample—not even close—but it’s still worth reporting, because it’s a change in their behavior): they’re not only reading more, but they’re reading more widely. And they’re drawn to big-canvas stories: Hemingway and Ayn Rand [!] are having a resurgence.

The extraordinary two-week outpouring of affection after the recent death of Norman Mailer put the spotlight on an era when authors—and books, of course—mattered. Articles about Mailer appeared so far and wide in the media that they left an impression. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten a lot of requests for guidance about the post-war mid-twentieth-century writers. I’ve pointed my young friends toward Bellow, Heller, Roth, Malamud, Capote, Talese, Thompson, Mailer, Wolfe, and Updike. Did I leave anyone out?

It’s an unexpected pleasure to be asked for book recommendations. You know what I mean?

Also, for me it’s just another indicator that the popular culture—TV and the movies—isn’t providing enough in the way of stories to satisfy the voracious hunger of the entertainment-consuming public. And the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike isn’t helping.

A restless public could do worse than turn to books, of course.

But even if they don’t—and this is my real point—storytellers should stop worrying and relax. The form in which they tell their tales will change and evolve.

But as long as there are human beings who want to know what happened? or what’s happening?, storytellers will never run out of business.

So: if you love books, set them free™—and let them evolve.

The NYT’s David Carr makes it sound easy:  Stay out of the spotlight! [e.a.]

If Ms. Regan and the News Corporation don’t settle, the discovery and trial could be embarrassing. …

It’s not that her particular claims about the News Corporation have to stick. Pull back the blankets on any enterprise — the book business, the movie business, what the heck, the news business — and some common industry practices are not going to look so good in the cold light of the courtroom. She was in a position to know a lot, and she may be in the mood to tell all of it.

“We don’t know the truth of the various allegations, but other things may come out that are not directly related to what she is suing for,” said Mark C. Zauderer, a Manhattan trial lawyer. “You have to consider the financial exposure versus the reputational exposure of not settling.”

Carr suggests that it’s NewsCorp. which will suffer embarrassment.

So before News Corporation executives decide to tangle with Ms. Regan in court, perhaps they should remember why they hired her in the first place.

Um, no. Rupert Murdoch, his reputation as a bottom feeder cemented, cannot possibly be embarrassed. It’s the reputation of HarperCollins that’s at stake here, and publishers don’t really need bad publicity, because their business is under enough pressure as is.

But publishers do seem a tad dazed and confused about the darn pace of things these days. Why, Peter Osnos was amazed that a feeding frenzy erupted over catalog copy from a book he plans to publish in April 2008:

[W]hat was amazing about the response was that it became a huge story before anyone pursued its context. …

The first reaction to the excerpt was that McClellan, by saying they were “involved,” was accusing the president and vice-president of deliberate deception. The rejoicing among administration critics was palpable. Senators Schumer and Dodd and the outed Valerie Plame herself were immediately available to denounce the president. …

We conferred with McClellan and decided that he was better off working on his book than grappling with the media (I did not immediately realize that there was a firestorm on the Web and cable …) I explained [to the media] that … the full story must await publication.

The backlash then ensued … [T]he newspaper Web sites, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, joined in the fray with blog entries and chat sessions conveying full sound and fury and the “deflating” fact that McClellan was not accusing the president of deliberate deception.

And the meaning of it all?

Scott McClellan is writing a responsible book about his moment in history. Much of our popular media, including some leading brand names, apparently shoot first and ask later. The blogosphere and cable news operate in a universe of their own in which frenzy and vituperation are the major currency.

Well, yes: the public is eager for new entertainments, so the guardians of the court of public opinion—the media—needs a constant supply of grist for the mill. Of course they get all frenzied and vituperative. Everybody knows that.

The days of old-fashioned publicity campaigns and fancy, newfangled rollouts—controlled and controllable—are over.

No one has yet managed to harness the power of a viral media frenzy to benefit him/herself: the results are too unpredictable. That’s why everyone is—or should be—cautious about getting into the spotlight.

Just as one literary giant dies—Norman Mailer, who wrote in 1959 in Advertisements for Myself that he was

imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of [his] time

… another literary giant rises. GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan explains:

Last week, a literary agent sent out the following letter to an unknown number of editors:

“Today you will be receiving via messenger a package containing two completed works of non-fiction, and four proposals for non-fiction works-in-progress. They represent the work of author [redacted], whose disruption and transformation of the non-fiction form will, we believe, one day garner him the highest literary honors. His works will sell millions of copies, and will be translated into hundreds of languages. His name will register in the lexicon of American literature and cultural studies. And his work, by its revolutionary character, will permanently alter the landscape of publishing and the consciousness of the Western reader.”
The author is a former Rolling Stone and Village Voice contributor

Quite the sales pitch, eh?

Oh horrors! British literary fiction is going directly-to-paperback at one publishing house:

From spring, Picador will use paperbacks to launch new books from all of its literary fiction writers, unless they have a guaranteed profitable hardback market. It estimates that 80% of its literary fiction will be published in this way.

Rival publishers described it as “a seismic change”.

“Hardback then paperback has been the model for 60 years,” said Dan Franklin, the veteran publisher at Jonathan Cape. “I would be worried about the call to Cormac McCarthy to tell him he’s going straight into mass-market paperback. I think he’d say no thanks.”

McCarthy might argue his hardbacks make money. Since it was published last November, The Road has sold almost 1,000 copies a month in Britain, earning £156,221.

Kirsty Dunseath, publishing director of Weidenfield & Nicholson, said the move could lessen the prestige of the novels. “Coming out in hardback is a statement of confidence in a novel and gets the reviews,” she said. “It doesn’t say much for your confidence coming out in paperback. Anyway, £12.99 isn’t such a high price to pay – you’d happily pay that for a CD.”

But Andrew Kidd, the publisher at Picador, is convinced the hardback’s primacy is over. “Over the last few years publishers have witnessed sales of literary fiction in hardback reaching new lows,” he said. “All of us find that depressing, and there are, frankly, no reasons to think the situation might soon reverse itself.”

To the dolt who’s worried about the “loss of prestige” that accompanies paperback-only publication, I say: where’s the prestige in failing to offer the public works that capture their imagination?

If you publish the right books—the truly excellent books—readers will come.

So I was just writing about the worthiness of the endeavor of book publishing, right?

Well, here’s an item sure to make you think twice about that:

Rosie O’Donnell has used her Web site to lash out about her own, upcoming book of memoirs.

O’Donnell wrote on her blog, that she received a copy of her new book (due in stores on Oct. 2), “Celebrity Detox (The Fame Game),” and was shocked by notes on the sleeve of the hardcover.

“So i just got my first hard copy of my new book CELEBRITY DETOX there on the front flap in print ‘when rosie odonnells (sic) mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1968, ten year old rosie thought fame could cure her,’ i was born in 1962 my mother was diagnosed in 1973 WTF!” the actress and former “View” moderator wrote.

How could this many mistakes make their way into flap copy? Let me count the ways:

Whoever wrote the copy hadn’t read the book. (Yes, it happens.)
Whoever edited/proofread the copy hadn’t read the book. (Yes, it happens.)
Rosie O’Donnell and her people didn’t read the flap copy. (Yes, it happens.)

There was a failure at every level—including yours, Rosie. Tough luck.

Steve Wasserman makes the case. No one in recent memory has made it better [e.a.]:

It is now possible through the magic of Internet browsing and buying to obtain virtually any book ever printed and have it delivered to your doorstep no matter where you live. This achievement, combined with the vast archipelago of bricks-and-mortar emporiums operated by, say, Barnes & Noble or Borders or any of the more robust of the independent stores, has given Americans a cornucopia of riches. To be sure, there has also been the concomitant and deplorable collapse of many independent bookstores—down by half from the nearly four thousand such stores that existed in 1990. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the landscape of contemporary American bookselling and publishing makes it hard not to believe we are living at the apotheosis of our culture. Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

This is, strangely, a story that has not received near the attention it deserves. And yet its implications are large, especially if papers are to have a prayer of retaining readers and expanding circulation. There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the opportunities that lie all around them.

Read it. And then go hit up the richest philathropists you know to start supporting culture, ’cause we’re gonna need ‘em.

As not-Hepzeeba, I have long said that I would never bet against Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House and for 50 years a mainstay of the publishing biz. Epstein is that rare bird: an intellectual heavyweight, who shepherded many of his authors to the Pulitzer Prize, and at the same time a shrewd, enterprising, and shamelessly profit-oriented businessman.

Among the innovations he can lay claim to are:

the trade paperback (which has all but overtaken the mass market paperback format in popularity)

The New York Review of Books (co-founder, with his late ex-wife, Barbara Epstein)

The Reader’s Catalog

The Library of America

and now the Espresso Book Machine, featured as part of his new venture, On Demand Books.

“In theory, every book printed will be digitized, which means the market will be radically decentralized,” Epstein tells Publishers Weekly. The machines are expected to cost about $100,000 each and they will join similar quick-publish efforts such as the InstaBook machine. On Demand Books hopes the Espresso will be used by stores and libraries to print books that are out of stock or hard to find. The New York Public Library has already installed one in its Science, Industry and Business Library.

If you build it, they will come.

More power to Epstein.

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?

At the trade show Book Expo 2007, Mike Shatzkin told publishers that books are exploding, that their world is gone, and that they had better get cracking:

This speech is called “The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World.”

We are not saying that general trade bookstores will disappear,
although we think there will be fewer of them and the consolidation in that sector will continue.

We are not saying that everybody will read on screens and paper books will disappear, although we already know that certain kinds of information formerly best housed in books is now better delivered through electronic media.

We are not saying that novels will be replaced by multi-media interactive adventures, although we think those will continue to grow and thrive. They are more likely to cut into movies and today’s games than they are into books.

And we are definitely not saying that long form reading is doomed over the next two decades, although we don’t think anybody really knows how much it will be reduced by changes in attention spans and information absorption habits of the
generations that are kids today and those that will follow them.

We don’t see any indications that long form reading will increase, but, given the unpredictable ways that change works on the human psyche, we wouldn’t rule it out.

But we are definitely saying that every general trade publisher of 2007 must have a plan to change over the next decade or two if they want to survive.

As Jeff Jarvis, among others, has been saying (shouting about!) for years, the revolution in books, as in other media, is being driven by the people formerly known as the audience: consumers who want to use all cultural products in their own way, on their own time schedule, and on (multiple) devices of their own choosing.

Shatzkin sketches out how the process will work for books—the imprimatur of a Publishers Weekly or a New York Times Book Review will no longer be meaningful, because publishers will be selling to “communities of the interested”:

While the engineers will be building storage capacity and bandwidth faster than we can create intellectual property, our audiences are going to be organizing what we do create, and organizing themselves to discuss it, add to it, and mash it up in various ways. That’s the other thing that we can already see that is a critical change dynamic challenging general trade publishing: people moving from the
horizontal media we’ve always known to niche communities of the interested.

Then he gets a little utopian about the far-reaching implications of the information revolution:

Every obsession, no matter what it is, will be ultimately indulged. All of the books and movies and songs and more– many articles from periodicals and journals and people’s private notes and amateur and professional commentary on all of the above — will have been sorted through, or will be being sorted through
by the community. It will be gathered, rated, graded and hyperlinked. And it will all exist in such a way so that your own observations and insights can become part of the wealth of knowledge anytime you want them to be.

Getting back to reality, Shatzkin also gets to the heart of the issue—how publishers can serve the niches: through the credibility of their brands:

All of this has profound implications for “brand”. Credibility is
a critical component of brand. In a niched world, credibility, and therefore brand, will move to an increasingly granular level.

There are people trusted in the left- and rightwing blogosphere that aren’t at all known in the mainstream media. That’s true for every subject. We’re close to a tipping point, or maybe we’re past it — nichiest subjects first — where web-based branding will have more credibility than print, because print, needing more horizontal reach to be viable, won’t deliver the attention of the real experts and megaphones in each field.

Got that? Web-based branding will have more credibility than print.

I’m on board. Can I see a show of hands of others who get this? And will they please identify themselves so that we can work toward this brave new world together?

I’ll be waiting. You know where to find me.

In its business section last Sunday, the New York Times lavished a great deal of attention on the crapshoot that is the book publishing business (though writer Shira Boss was way less than flattering about the business acumen of publishing’s many brilliant practitioners, as Michael Cader pointed out in yesterday’s Publishers Lunch [registration required]):

You’ve probably already seen the latest installment in the NYT’s standing program to demonstrate to their readers that book publishers are idiots and formed plenty of your own opinions, but I thought this little note said it best:”The editor of the Sunday Business section is under contract to Random House and did not edit this article.”And it shows. Good idea for freelance writers: Pitch expose to NYT asserting opposite thesis, that publishers are interrogating readers to find out “what they want” in their books and forcing authors to write to market. I guarantee you’ll make Page 1 instead of just the business section.

That’s kinda inside baseball, though.

Now comes David Blum to examine (forlornly) why a particular novel that he loved, Then We Came to the End (which I happened to mention here), didn’t become a bestseller and didn’t make a mark on the culture.

It’s hardly fair to label “Then We Came to the End” a failure. The book’s publisher, Little Brown, says it has shipped 50,000 copies. It’s in its fourth printing, and still selling well. That’s a goal rarely achieved by any writer, let alone a debut novelist. Its smart yet realistic editor, Reagan Arthur, accurately describes “Then We Came to the End” as “slow-developing but genuine success.” The book has already returned a profit for its publisher, has been optioned by HBO Films (with Mr. Ferris attached to write the script), and has come closer than most to hitting that ever-shrinking bull’s eye of best-sellerdom.

But no one could possibly call the novel a national sensation. And its mid-range sales figures seem especially odd in light of the industry’s recent hand-wringing over the elimination of book-review sections in newspapers, where Mr. Ferris’s book did dominate. Two weeks ago, picketers actually marched in front of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to protest the removal of Teresa Weaver, the paper’s book review editor. Others have howled about publications being gforced to move their book coverage to the Web. The Chicago Tribune’s book review section, once a part of the paper’s high-circulation Sunday paper, has been relegated to the tiny Saturday edition. No less a novelist than Richard Ford decried the shift as “another erosive loss to the public’s cultural discourse.”

I’ll concede the point that book review sections don’t deserve to be whacked. But why doesn’t discourse result in sales? If Mr. Ford is right, then shouldn’t smart, alert readers have been lining up to buy the Ferris novel? Something doesn’t compute.

Indeed, something doesn’t compute. Blum goes on to make some good arguments—namely, that review attention isn’t enough to move copies of a book and that a title no one can remember is a definite black mark against a book. (Rules for Old Men Waiting, a marvelous novel by Peter Pouncey published a couple of years ago, suffered the same fate as Then We Came to the End: it did well, but not as well as it should have. It had bad title for the business climate in which it was published. Oh well.).

Sarah at GalleyCat begs to differ with Blum; Ferris’s book made the extended list, she points out.

First is Blum’s question as to why the book “did not become a New York Times bestseller”: Sure, it didn’t appear on the print list, but came very close – hitting #19 on the April 18th extended list. …

[N]o wonder [the book's editor] Reagan Arthur “got depressed” at Blum’s questioning when the book did fairly well and turned a profit – and more importantly, probably earned out long before publication because buying world rights yielded foreign sales fruit.

If you know what the “extended list” is, you’re inside baseball. If you think making #19 on the extended list is a good result for a book that was featured on the cover of the New York Times book review, you are definitely not deep enough inside baseball. You’re just a bitchy David Blum hater, because he “so happlessly ran the Village Voice into the ground.” (Right. In the half dozen or so months that he was there.)

David Blum’s point is that even the fiction that is highly touted by the alleged know-nothings of the publishing industry (see Michael Cader’s remarks above) and pumped by the New York Times Book Review is not making a dent in the cultural life of America. It’s not getting traction.

That, dear GalleyCat, is the awful truth for those of us who love books. Deal with it.