See, the anti-Kindle rants I did a while ago aren't all a ludite screaming in the darkness.

With all apologies to my co-editor Brian for pushing his piece on eBook pricing further down the site, this article in today's Pogue's Posts from the New York Times just couldn't go by without a spotlight put on it. David Pogue's short article shows that ebooks aren't "exactly, you know, just like real books, only better" which is what all of us doubters have been told time and time again when we dared to question the usefulness and importance of this new technology. Apparently, Amazon.com took back copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from people and removed them from their Kindles with nary a word to those who had purchased the ebook because the publisher of the electronic edition changed their mind and didn't want an electronic edition.

Aside from the obvious bullshit going on here, it does feel curiously like Big Brother, no? In Newspeak let's call this Amazon.com action, um, "negpurch" for negative purchase...yeah, that should do it.

Me? I'm just gonna peruse my Signet Classic edition of 1984, located conveniently right next to me on my bookshelf.

The Kindle stinks.

E-book Bonanza

I'm exhausted by all this e-book pricing talk (link to agent Nathan Bransford's blog posting, which in turn has many links to various opinions), but it's an important debate to have. Perhaps we should look to the newspaper world for some sort of lesson: once some big players started making online content free, everyone did it, and now they have all this online content for which they cannot charge, with ad revenue not high enough to keep them afloat. We need to hash out how to sell e-books at a rate that will be sustainable if this market keeps gaining ground at the rate is has been. Despite Amazon's insistence, $9.99 might not be the magic number.

Many are blogging about Jack Shafer's Slate article on the danger of pirating in e-books, which is of course related to the pricing. He makes some okay points in this article but I think his larger point about needing to really take the consumer into consideration is problematic. If we focus too much on the consumer, are we going to devalue the work that goes into writing and even publishing a book? Just because a book is easy to download and read on a portable device doesn't mean it was written or edited or produced with the same level of ease.

As usual, I hope we can find a balance here. It seems to be, the end should match the process. If an author is a scribbler who churns out a novel or two a year, something very genre oriented such as romance or thriller, books whose primary format is mass market, then a cheap e-book edition makes sense. But then you look at a large and thorough biography and things change. My partner just purchased D. Guttenplan's American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone, a 570 page, $35 hardcover. He bought it full-price at the charming Provincetown Book Shop, an independent worth supporting, but he later expressed surprise as the price, when he thought about it. I explained how a big biography like that should be expensive. The author spent over a decade writing this book, so he should be paid for that time. It makes sense that the reader should pay for the privilege of reading the result of his labor.

In this talk of e-book pricing, I worry that the call to think of the consumer is overlooking the efforts of writers, and that this will contibute to the ongoing trend of editors pushing writers to finish projects in months, not years, even if projects demand more thorough research and more delicate writing. Then we get crappier products for cheaper prices, and authors have books that they cannot take as much pride in, and publishers have lists that don't hold up to close scrutiny. All for a reader's convenience. It just doesn't seem worth it.

The time is now to set these prices, and I just hope the so-called market doesn't prevail. I haven't read the new book by Ellen Ruppel Shell called Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, but after hearing her on NPR, it sounds like she touches on my concerns, in other industries. We now scoff at a t-shirt costing more than $5 or a bookshelf that's more than $20, so retailers are getting the prices down by cutting costs on production, on labor. This could just as easily happen in publishing if we keep diving deeper in our prices, endlessly worried about the consumer.

The more this hypothetical consumer is discussed, the more s/he sounds like another evil, made-up character that recurs in media discussions: the undecided voter. So irritating. They shrug and we all struggle to make them happy. I'm over it. We shouldn't be beholden to this threatening, petulant figure, always threatening to not give up his/her vote or purchase. At some point one must wonder, how real is this character?

Advances Don't Always Add Up

Blogger and author John Green has caused a bit of a dust-up with his argument about publishers needing to change their thinking, letting go of the blockbuster model, focusing less on increasing advances, and instead focusing more on raising the royalty rates they offer authors, especially first time novelists. He compares publishers to mortgage brokers and practically shrugs at the segment of the industry that refuses to change their business model, suggesting what they do now is simply unsustainable.

I do not foresee big, corporate publishers letting the blockbuster idea go. With the loss of editors in the last year, maybe competition for books will die down and there will be less in-house competition for new projects, at least. Green's advice, however, is useful for smaller, independent, more nimble publishers who benefit from consistent, steady lists, with longtime partnerships with authors.

Green et al are up against the publishers who scream, "You have no idea what publishing a book actually costs - trust me!," and who end their argument there. Then there are agents who say, "We... er, YOU deserve more money, author!" But there are also publishers, editors, agents, and authors saying they want something more longterm and reliable

Free Isn't Free

I know I sound downright curmudgeonly when I admit to some feeling of smug satisfaction at hearing the news about Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson getting busted for lifting copy out of Wikipedia in his new book, Free: The Future of a  Radical Price.  It seems Mr. Anderson was rushing through some final edits, after settling a disagreement with his editor about how to properly cite Wikipedia and other digital sources. In his rush, errors were made. He explains himself here.

Why am I feeling a bit smug about this error? A couple of reasons.

As someone who worries we're moving far too quickly into the digital age without giving proper thought to it, led almost blindly by the supposed invisible hand of the market, I greatly admire that the old literary institution, in print since 1925, known as the Virginia Quarterly Review caught this error in Anderson's book.  Well done! This catch reminds us of the importance of institutions - often supported by universities or even, dare I say, the government - who thoroughly review products for public safety. I'm thrilled that such an institution managed to call out this error.

In addition, I feel this error, occurring in a rush to get a book into production, serves to remind us of how easy it is for errors to occur when we're all doing everything online and expecting it all to be done so much faster because of technology. Yes you can reach people easier and yes you can edit quicker without shipping manuscripts and yes you can fix errors later than ever. But it is important for those in publishing to remember to catch details, and that can mean slowing down in this manic hyperdigital world and READING what you're PUBLISHING. 

It's curious that techno-lovers are dismissing this errors. BoingBoing was particularly unconcerned with this "web tempest":

All the web loves a blogtroversy and a public takedown, and many sites covering the matter invoked the p-word: plagiarism.

In my opinion, Anderson handled the situation honorably: he responded directly, candidly, and immediately. He publicly took responsibility for the "screwup" first, and explained what had happened in more detail later, without backtracking on the failure(s) and why they matter.

 No bigs. Just a bunch of bloggers getting all up and arms about nothing, just the p-word. 

Look, I understand this isn't George Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished" a month after a war started, a war that has now gone on almost a decade, or some Bush official dismissing the thousands of people stranded and starving in New Orleans after Katrina. Fine. But "the p-word" is kind of a huge deal to p-people - publishing folks like me and readers of this blog who know that the written word is all we got. If you denigrate that with the mentality that it can be fixed later, no big deal, we got some trouble coming down the line.

And this is a future that might slam BAM! right in our face if we keep moving at the current speed with such little regard for details and the integrity of publishers. And this goes back to something that occurs to me regularly: just because it's easy, doesn't mean we should do it. I can call you from the top of the Empire State Building! Please don't. I can access email even while on vacation in Athens! Don't bother. Look, this hotel room on Machu Picchu has Mtv! Turn it off.

I can have errors in my book - I can just fix them later! Um...

Survival by way of Co-existence

I apologize for the light posting, but my day job is keeping me very busy.

I wanted to point out two recent instances of how the not-so-new digital age can include good ol' fashioned books, as the two often complement one another. I figure it's a useful strategy for keeping books around, at least for now. Right?

The first example was on CNN, not a station I watch all that voluntarily. Well, I don't have cable, so I can't watch it either way, but it is on at the gym and it's much more bearable than ESPN. I was there this weekend, running and watching Fareed Zakaria GPS. It was, of course, all Iran, all the time - as it should be. But after working with his guests to incorporate online information, especially snippets pulled from Twitter, on a giant flat screen that lay in front of them as a desk, Zakaria then looked up and ended the segment with... wait for it... two book recommendations! Though I cannot vouch for these books, the ones he recommended were:

- The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran by Hooman Majd

- ... I don't remember! Sorry, but I was running and just pleased to see BOOKS being promoted. It was a travelogue, by an American who may or may not been of Persian descent.

Everyone's been discussing the Twitter effect with this news story, the amount of uncensored voices coming off the streets of Tehran right into homes across the world, and it is astonishing. It's also fascinating to see the way media is handling media - so there is old stalwart CNN, suddenly risking being seen as dated, clicking through online and recommending, on air and online, Andrew Sullivan's blog. It's nice to see in this enthusiasm for all things immediate that someone thought of books, for those of us that want to see real time but also want the full back story.

The second item I wanted to note here was new Granta editor John Freeman's plea for print in the UK Independent. While I admire his rhetoric here in arguing for the importance of print publications, I also appreciate how he ties in the importance of literary voices, first:

Publishers are still buying multi-million celebrity "books" but grow antsy when it comes to signing up literary writers, the type whose fourth or fifth book (such as Joseph O'Neill's Netherland) might someday underwrite an entire season. It's always the end times in publishing, sure, but due to the anxiety over new technology and the comeuppance created by far too much corporate merging these are especially dour ones...

A week ago, a friend told me that one of the largest publishers in the US had recently done a survey. The pure cost of making a book, they discovered – before paying any advance – was roughly $65,000. That was the number editors had to keep in mind before they made any decision about signing up a new title.

Could it conceivably earn back $65,000? This question puts most types of literature at an instant disadvantage. Do any books of poems earn back $65,000? What about a short story collection? Can any book in translation stride over that mighty financial hurdle? Or a collection of novellas? Maybe that number was revealed to editors as a reminder, not a rule, but it points rather unsubtly toward what sells: entertainment, scandal, politics, and famous writers with known audiences.

And then pulls in international voices in particular, combining his perspective on technology with the reality of new literary voices emerging from anywhere and everywhere:

While American literature remains enormously vital and restless – could England ever have produced a Thomas Pynchon? Junot Diaz? – a literary journal cannot in good conscience pretend that an Anglo-American dialogue is at the heart of our cultures. Not when Nigeria alone has given us Chimamanda Adichie, Helon Habila and Uwem Akpan. Not when Kiran Desai and Suketu Mehta are exploring New York more viscerally than most writers born there, or when some of America's most exciting young novelists, such as Dave Eggers and Tony D'Souza, are finding a way to tell vital stories set in Sudan and Western Africa...

In troubled and violent times, we do not have the luxury to avoid the hard questions which have stalked English language publishing in recent years. What stories are made visible? In what syntax do they appear? Why are writers in translation made to speak on behalf of their entire country?

Another fair point.

Freeman makes a solid case for the importance of print as he wraps up, spinning ideas around but somehow having them land on their feet: "If the forces at work in publishing persist, we're moving towards a world with less and less available in print. Publication on an actual press upon paper which was once a tree will become special again, as it should be - a cause for celebration." Once again, a vision I can support.

May Granta live on, then, and prosper!

More editorial insight, and Joe Meno!

I go through short phases where I read experimental fiction, and truth be told, it ain't really all that experimental. But a few years ago, I picked up Joe Meno's charming book, The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic), at an indie bookstore in NYC, and loved it. I've been meaning to read more of Meno, and after today, perhaps I will.

Over at The Millions, Edan Lepucki has posted a nice long interview with Meno about his new book, The Great Perhaps (Norton), that strays into questions of publishing and writing. Meno shares many of my views, it seems, including the frustation with sameness:

There's a sameness to the book covers... there's an aesthetic sameness to the way books are being sold, the kind of books that are put out, the content. There's a sameness to the background of the writers - how many novelists graduated from Columbia... or Iowa. There's a sameness to the style, and what New York publishing deems serious. [The style] is heavily realistic. It's become increasingly in years bent more towards memoir, and almost journalistic. The era of inventive writing, writers like Vonnegut, Pynchon and Barthelme, outside of McSweeney's, is almost non-existent... If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you write a certain kind of book, a certain tone, a certain style.

I even appreciate his mention of McSweeneys, a place I both enjoy at times but also can find predictable. Like Harvard Square, it's well-meaning and politically in the right direction, but as it's gained in popularity, it's lost a bit in inventiveness. (Perhaps this will be rectified as they find new columnists.)

Meno sees good things happening though and, as the writer of the interview notes, maintains a hopeful tone. He mentions:

"There are plenty of writers who I admire who work outside of those boundaries but few of them are published by big houses, and few of them are known in America. They're certainly not being reviewed in the New York Times, and excerpts aren't being placed in the New Yorker. And I also think there's an aspect of age and generation. As new media comes into it, there's going to be shift."

This again is a reference to the great promise of the internet, to widen the net so smart folks - he names drops Richard Nash and Melville House, two SotB favorites - can find good, inventive new writers without relying on NYC lunches with a handful of agents.

I'm all for some hope in publishing. I'll add Meno to the list as one of the good ones, and try to remember to grab one of his books for my next read.

It was just a matter of time

I knew this would happen. Hell, maybe it's happened before and this is the first I've heard of it.

A classic novel has become twitter fodder:

Two devotees of Ulysses have adapted its 10th chapter to Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post.

Called Wandering Rocks, the chapter is especially well-suited to Twitter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily business.

I guess I don't care, really. All's fair. I just don't want to read something in 140 character (not even word!) chunks. But for those of you who do, go nuts.

Georgia Tech prof Ian Bogost has something larger than just novelty in mind: "Perhaps in so doing, we can shift people's interest in social media technologies from egomania and immediacy toward deliberation and cultural reflection."

Some part of me prefers the idea mentioned on Galleycat recently, of creating a twitter feed for a fictional character. I've long appreciated novels that jump off from another classic - such as J. M. Coetzee's powerful and odd Foe, a "reshaping" of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. And this could be where advances can be made incorporating people who love reading with Twitter - Huck Finn's feed, or Holden Caufield's.

Oh, maybe be careful on the latter...

It's a cute list with a flawed premise.

Never one to denigrate the great literary culture of Boston and its environs, I was delighted to see that the indentured servants over at the Boston Globe came up with a list of the 100 Essential New England Books. It is a great idea to showcase all of the writing that has come from the smallest corner of this huge nation. It is a reminder to all that we still lead the league in healthier, happier, sexier, smarter lives than the rest of the United States (oh, and I heard that our french fries taste the best too). All the usual suspects are on the list:

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

You get the idea...but wait there's more! There are some pretty clever picks that I didn't think of when I perused the list (but I will let you discover those for yourself). However, there is one huge problem with the list. Apparently, and I may be wrong here but it seems like anyone who has ever heard of New England can make the list. For instance, the #1 book on the list is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I agree that he once lived in Massachusetts or that the book is set in Boston but so what? What, really, does Infinite Jest tell anyone living outside of New England about New England? Team of Rivals by Doris Kearnes Goodwin checks in at #7. Again, so what does this have to do with New England? Not a thing really other than some of the politicians in the book are from Massachusetts and DKG lives here. Here are a few more of the books which stretch the category of the list to its breaking point (with Globe commentary added):

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud, 2006

Somerville resident and Yale graduate Messud wrote this bestselling, critically acclaimed 2006 novel about three privileged friends in their early thirties, living in Manhattan in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, and their struggles to achieve lofty expectations in their personal and professional lives.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, 2003

Born in Exeter, N.H., Brown has become one of the giants of contemporary fiction. In this wildly popular mystery novel, Brown’s plot describes the efforts of Robert Langdon, professor of religious symbology at Harvard University, trying to solve the murder of renowned curator Jacques Saunière of Paris’s Louvre Museum.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957

Lowell-born Kerouac’s great road novel remains a monument of the entire Beat Generation. Kerouac’s improvisational, experimental writing style, and his unconventional way of living, is everywhere on display in this classic 1957 story about freedom, the open road, friendship, art, and adventure.

Couldn't Ms. Messud's book be thought of as really about New York, not Boston? Isn't the DaVinci Code really about the Catholic Church or, at least, Europe? And no one-absolutely no one-thinks of New England while they are reading On The Road. Sorry, the truth hurts. What about Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama? I mean, he attended Harvard and, until recently, had a family member living in Boston. Seriously, I think that the plan was a great one but the executionof that plan really suffered by allowing anyone who once vacationed on the Cape to be eligible for inclusion on the list. Am I being too nitpicky? I don't thing so because our region of the US is often used as the butt of jokes around the country about elitism, over-intellectualism, snobbery, etc...and all this list does is suggest that if you are smart enough to have written a book and either set said book in New England or lived in New England yourself then "you are one of us." I think that does a disservice to the reality of New Englanders who have lived in this great area all their lives and understand far more fully, in ways that David Foster Wallace simply couldn't, that New England is mostly a state of mind and disposition not geography.

Oh, and any list which includes Andre Dubus III to the exclusion of his father Andre Dubus, Sr. is not worth its weight in computer pixels. If you really want to learn about the New England mindset and what it means to live here, please, please, please go pick up any of Andre Dubus's first 4 collections of short stories: Separate Flights, Adultery and Other Choices, Finding a Girl in America, or The Times Are Never So Bad. Though not all the fiction here is set in New England the pieces that are deal with the lives of New Englanders in ways not even imagined in most, if not all, of the Boston Globe's list.

Finally, just to show you that New England is more a state of mind than a location I present as evidence that the books from Andre Dubus I referenced above are written by a son of Louisiana who moved here and made this area-with its history, its religious pressures, it permissiveness, its intellectual attitudes, etc-his own.

Plus, no one really thinks those Yankee fans along the beaches of the Long Island sound are really New Englanders anyway. Just sayin'.

An Editor Speaks!

I always appreciate when an editor from a big house (or formerly, as the case may be more and more) speaks out about publishing from that unique vantage point. In this case, that editor is Juliet Ulman, former editor for the sci-fi/fantasy imprint Spectra over at Bantam, who lost her job with the publishing re-shuffle and now runs an editorial consultancy, Paper Tyger. She did a q&a with Jeff VanderMeer over at Omnivoracious.

Not being a sci-fi/fantasy guy at all, I was still intrigued by her thoughts on where the potential lies in publishing, given the grim year we've experienced:

I think it's premature to be sounding the dealth knell for traditional publishing just yet; however, the landscape is changing. It is certainly true that in these times of economic upheaval, the larger publishers are not just tightening their belts, but also becoming even more concerned with escaping the unpredictability of success. I believe we are going to see (and have already seen the first suggestions of) a hopefully temporary shift back towards the "basics" upon which many houses were built, and acquisitions will become more conservative both in scope and in cost. This retraction leaves the field open for the independent publishers, many of whom are flourishing where other larger beasts are floundering because they are more nimble and more focused, serving a smaller, carefully targeted market rather than trying to reach all consumers, and serving that market with dedication and alacrity. I think of the large houses as ocean liners--their weight and bulk makes it easier to disperse pressures evenly across the ship, and they are less immediately affected by the sharp lifts and falls of the market, but that same solidity renders them slower and and difficult to turn. It's a trade-off. I think that people are frightened that the market will contract and harden, becoming an impossible playing field for the unusual or unproven, but I don't think that this is entirely the case. I think that you will certainly see this kind of contraction from the umbrella houses of publishing, and a fair bit of trimming the fat to stay afloat, but those imprints that have branded themselves successfully and are quick to move with the winds and embrace the changes in both our economy and our society will find their feet. I expect that rather than dying out, the independent press will be the fertile ground from which a new vision of How Publishing Works will emerge.

I know we've heard this before, but hey, I think it's fantastic, and I agree, and I hope we're all right!

Something Old on Something(s) New

I always appreciate when someone uses a simple idea to make a point. Dean Ann Kirschner of City University of New York does just that over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The premise of her short article, well worth a read, is that she read Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit (rather her...) in traditional book form, on a Kindle, and on her iPhone, and listened to an audio version, so she could compare each format. Simple, but effective.

The beauty of this kind of article is that Kirschner is being openly subjective - she loves audio, for example, unlike many of us. (My mother summed it up best in referring to how much she enjoyed her time in the car on the way to work, listening to books: "I guess I just like being read to." I appreciate her translating a book format into some kind of luxury, like a spa day.) And as it turns out, Kirschner really can't stand her Kindle, which leads her on a bit of a tangent:

I've been dreading this, but let me get my prediction out now: The iPhone is a Kindle killer.

I abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost nothing that an iPhone can't do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me. Woody Allen had it right: Seventy percent of success in life is showing up. Yes, the Kindle's reasonable imitation of a book is an advantage, but not enough to outweigh the necessity to carry an extra object and its power plugs. The Kindle screen is a permanent dishwater gray, not exactly "just like paper," as promised by the ubiquitous Amazon ads. With free software like eReader or Stanza, iPhone readers have the same capability for customization (font size, footnotes, highlighting, bookmarking) and a more-elegant interface. The new Kindle2 has an intriguing capability to turn any book into an audiobook, but even if that survives the legal challenges from publishers, the computer-generated voice is more R2-D2 than Jim Dale. Worst of all is Kindle's clumsy way of turning pages, only slightly improved on Kindle2. The momentary blackout is a constant annoyance, especially compared with the delicate swipe or tap that changes pages instantaneously on the iPhone (and which even has an option for cruise control, where the pages scroll automatically, though too slowly for speed readers).

The only time I relied on my Kindle was on vacation last year. All the grown-ups on beach chairs seemed to have one, as if we all had obeyed some secret command to buy Kindles and wear sunscreen. In fact, readers 50 or older are the largest group of Kindle buyers. Therein lies the clue to Kindle's short life. Middle-aged readers think that the dimension of the screen is critical. It's not: The members of the generation that grew up playing Game Boys and telling time on their cellphones will have absolutely no problem reading from a small screen. Let us pray that they will. Right now, they aren't buying Kindles — and they aren't reading books.

Nor will the newly announced large-format Kindle DX halt the death spiral of newspapers and textbooks. The days of prearranged and rigid formats are over. Sadly, so is the editorial intervention that authenticated and improved content. The future of all publishing is an open question.

This confirms various suspicions here at SotB, most especially those aired by Christopher. I'm fine with leaving the Kindle behind, or more accurately never going down that path, and my curiosity is piqued about the iPhone. But everytime I think it may be promising, I remember my dentist showing me his iSomething (don't remember - not the iPhone but some similar "i" device), on which he was reading Peter Canellos' book on Ted Kennedy, The Last Lion. It displayed all of 30 words on the "page," which meant that this book, 480 pages in hardcover format, was something like 1200 pages! Oy vey. It made me wonder if this kind of format could make even relatively short books seem daunting. But the display was coupled with my dentist's strong endorsement: "I'm reading now!"

Kirschner's point about the Kindle is of particular interest today with this big news, that Simon & Schuster will begin selling their ebooks through Scribd. "[A]s a Wall Street Journal report details, the S&S ebooks sold on Scribd will be available as Adobe Acrobat files that can be read but not printed out on computers and iPhones and Sony Readers — 'but not on Amazon’s Kindle.'” Take that, Goliath!

(I purposely chose to link to Melville House's excellent and up-to-date blog, MobyLives, rather than a more "objective" news source, such as GalleyCat, because I appreciate the commentary that goes with the news. -ed)