Ending the new year right

I know posts have been light, and I got some news: They're going to get lighter. Christopher and I will not be posting at all next week, due to travels, but we'll be back and better than ever as of Monday, January 11th.

So in this last post of 2009, I wanted to link to another blog that has done a fantastic job of exposing Amazon as a massive hype factory. Mike Cane over at The E-book Test has called out Amazon due to their refusal to provide numbers. How many of these stinkin' Kindles, the supposed top seller over at the mega-retailer, have actually been purchased? Amazon won't say.

In response, Cane has issued a challenge to trade publishers, to reveal sales of Kindle editions. And so far, things ain't lookin' too hot.

One anonymous publishing professional commented:

I work for a trade house, and while I am not going to reveal my identity or that of my employer, I can tell you that our top Kindle sales of any one title are in the range of about 1000 downloads life to date. I am someone who receives the sales numbers for our titles directly from Amazon and I look at them every week; and, I agree that the actual sales numbers are much LOWER than anyone is pretending to have achieved.

Not promising.

Another responded:

I also work at one of the big six trade houses, specifically in the ebooks dept. “200,000 ebooks sold” is laughable, even if it *is* Dan Brown. Our numbers track much closer to the above Anonymous posters’.

Amazon’s lack of transparency in disclosing these numbers is unconscionable, and is making publishers, who are already scared stupid, act even stupider.

Oh, and while I’m here: this silly business of labeling free ebooks as ‘bestsellers’ needs to stop, too.

Strike two. Here's hoping for a third one to knock this crap out of the park.

I should also note that Dennis Johnson, the publisher at Melville House whom I greatly respect, added his two cents:

It’s great that you’re questioning Amazon on yet another in an endless series of dishonest business practices, but why in the world are you laying it on publishers to tell the truth about Amazon, as opposed to simply calling upon Amazon to tell the truth itself? One would think it was even more morally incumbent upon Amazon to do so in the first place, and that it was as well legally incumbent upon it to do so as a publicly traded company. No matter how obvious a thing is in the book business, it seems it’s always the publisher that’s held responsible, and perceived as withholding the truth.

Mike Cane responded:

If publishers knew their “competitor’s” biggest-seller stats, they’d have a way of extrapolating some sort of data from that. Until they share this information, Amazon is using Divide & Conquer on them. Publishers can come to their own rescue.

All in all, a great post and an interesting conversation, which is what all us hapless publishing bloggers are going for.

Happy New Year, readers!

Someone Else with Hope

The posts may be a bit light if at all existant for the rest of this week given the holiday, but we're posting them fast and furious in the run up...

This is a quickie.

I wanted to post a link to Daniel Pritchard's post over at The Wooden Spoon about poetry. We of course did our small, small part - with Dan Gordinier's help - to encourage the reading of poetry, but Pritchard is must more knowledgeable than me and perhaps more invested.

In this post, Pritchard refers to comments by Ron Silliman on a year-end round-up at the Poetry Foundation blog, in which Silliman expresses his thoughts on where poetry stands in the current publishing landscape. Silliman is hopeful because small publishers can reach readers directly, but Pritchard in response complicates that sentiment in a useful way:

Poetry publishing has always been pretty niche. The changes are not so huge as to remove cultural authority altogether and make it so any random DIY-er chapbook publisher will thrive — someone with authority still needs to sign off on most things to convince readers to pick it up (hence, for instance, blurbs). And, as I've written here before, the fact of (almost) universal availability is not a sign of utopian egalitarianism; it's just a now-irrelevant a holdover from print. The internet is an amazing tool for making poetry available. Everything is equally available; that in itself is unremarkable.

But Pritchard, too, has hope:

Readers are getting savvier about the internet. Critics are beginning to engage more, to quote more, to take advantage of the resources of internet publishing instead of bemoaning the end of print. Authority can be re-constructed, with patience, over time, by helping readers make their own decisions through reasonable argument and justification. There is a new model emerging based on the quality of the writing and the criticism rather than monied interests. (I think of Reginald Shepherd, whose blogging introduced him to a whole audience.) That is what gives me hope for poetry.

So as we head into a whole new year, let's see if we can shore up some optimism, ignore endless Q&A's with Jeff Bezos about the wonders of the friggin' Kindle, and get good writing in front of eager readers.... preferably on a page rather than a screen.

Theatre is to Film as Book is to E-book?

We offer a range of exciting posts here at SotB, from quickie news alerts to lists of great books in a genre to mid-range commentaries on news buzzing around the publishing industry. But in the last week or so, an idea has been bumping around my head, though I keep getting distracted by things like chocolate truffles (we made them ourselves!) and christmas movie viewing parties (hosted by SotB's own Christopher!).

Ya see, my partner and I recently re-watched All About Eve, the classic 1950 Bette Davis movie about the young starlet, Eve Harrington, played by Anne Baxter. We own this dvd - quite frankly, every gay man should just be issued a copy upon coming out - and we brought it to some friends' house recently for a viewing. We all had to prepare to see the wonderful on-stage take off of the movie, the Gold Dust Orphan's All About Christmas Eve. This local (in Boston) production is only playing once more, this Saturday, but anything the Orphan's do is worth seeing. They are camp in the best sense, sure to offend and amuse and shock and impress and disgust. I can't say enough good things about this theatre troupe. I had to use the graphic from the play because it sums up a lot about the production

.

But back to Eve, the movie. Now stay with me, because if I play this right, it will work on two levels. This would be quite a writing feat for us here at SotB.

As the story of the film begins, Eve, a nobody, manages to get herself backstage to meet the star of the show, Margo Channing, played by a sour, cross, inflated Bette Davis. She's middle-aged and knows it, but keeps starring in this one playwright's plays, even as the main characters stay the same age. Channing's boyfriend is the director, and he's on his way out to California in this, his first scene. Eve says no one comes back once they go out to LA, but he swears he will. It seems Margo never made the move to movies.

What strikes me as so curious is how much the movie plays off the theatre world - you have the playwright and his wife, the emotional director and dramatic star, the treacherous film critic, Addison DeWitt. There is talk of packed houses, papering the theatre, and names in lights. But this movie came out in 1950. Surely it followed a conversation in which people questioned how long theatre would last as movies became the go-to evening entertainment.

To make matters more intriguing, in 2008, the Gold Dust Orphans traipse along and turn the whole thing into a play, and pull in crowds to see it each night, finding such success that they brought it back this year. And it's exciting to see live, as the actors pull out subtle and not-so-subtle moments in the movie and exaggerate to satiric and hilarious extremes. (My favorite is turning the playwright into a closeted Paul Lynde character - it's inspired.) This reminds me of the success Jill and Faith Soloway found when they created The Real Live Brady Bunch in 1990, reinvigorating a tv show into a live performance.

So what does this mean for books?

It just occurs to me that readers can switch between different mediums in their urge to read. I know this isn't shocking, but I was resistant to this point. (I suspect Christopher still is, to some extent.) Last weekend, as my partner and I wandered through B&N (though we didn't buy anything!), I found myself picking up some books and thinking, "this should have just been digital." Do we need writers reflecting on their favorite beaches as a printed book? I picked up the new hardcover I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir, by Mickey Leigh. Did that need to be in hardcover, for $26? Wouldn't that make more sense in paperback and digital editions?

This is all quite simplistic. So many things have to change, and they are changing. While they do, I still maintain we have to watch out. People who get all whipped into a frenzy saying it's time to tear down those walls and get books people want into people's hands are too often the people who can afford to produce their own books, which doesn't help up and coming writers.

Again, I find myself looking to indie publishers and university presses - the line between the two is ever blurring, when you look at the new South End Press, the Dalkey Archive, and the new deal for Curbstone Press. That's one exciting barrier to come down! Universities should support exciting publishing that's not going to generate huge revenue necessarily. We need to pump money into this places and let editors organize lists and generate new projects and new writers with an open mind, but also a sense of collective spirit.

The point is, we can open things up, and we should. Let's explore digital platforms. But screw Amazon and its controls - the Kindle is useless. Sadly, I test-drove the Nook on my way out of B&N and it was a massive fail, with slow, blinking page turns and general clunkiness. But as we all know, people are reading on all kinds of devices.

It's clear that people are going to read books about novelists writing on typewriters on their electronic devices, and perhaps then someone can write a book about the experience of reading that novel on that device and turn it into a memoir that gets published as a $26 hardcover and then turned into a movie, which can then become a hit stage musical. Maybe it's the holiday spirit racing through me, but finally I'm curious to see what all this could mean. Suddenly I want to see the digital succeed for appropriate genres and titles - which is not every title and every genre. But I want it to work in a way that will make indie publishers money, and new writers money. I don't want this to be a gimmick for fat cats, but something innovative and useful and real, something readers actually want rather than something an ad agency tells us we want.

In closing, and only tangentially related, my crush Makenna Goodman from indie great Chelsea Green has a new article up at HuffPost, and you know I already read it. I haven't read the book she mentions, How the Rich are Destroying the Earth by Herve Kempf, but no one should be surprised by my heightened level of interest.

Oh, and one last thing: give money to a charity (including but not limited to a library, literacy organization, or cultural center) this week. It's just the right thing to do!

Contemporary Poetry Starter Kits available!

I'm all for writing and talking about activist writing, as I have done here multiple times, but more literary writing deserves plenty of attention from publishing / readerly folks, too. In that spirit, I give you some poetry.

A few weeks ago, Jeff Gordinier got in touch with us here at SotB to alert us to a charming post he contributed to the Poetry Foundation's blog, which we referenced in a post here. In this post, he confessed to having an addiction to poetry books. I then exchanged an email or two with Gordinier and he kindly passed to me a list he had put together for a friend, which he referred to as a "'starter kit' for anyone who’s interested in dipping a toe into the vast pool of (mostly) contemporary poetry." I for one am thankful for such a "kit" as I'm fairly useless in this genre, reading randomly and messily when I come upon someone interesting.

So here ya go, folks, just in time for the gift-giving season... It's contemporary poetry worth having!

Say Uncle, by Kay Ryan
The Niagara River, by Kay Ryan
Crush, by Richard Siken
Making Certain It Goes On, by Richard Hugo
The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck
Averno, by Louise Gluck
Landing Light, by Don Paterson
Blood Dazzler, by Patricia Smith
Teahouse of the Almighty, by Patricia Smith
Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, by Simon Armitage
The Shout, by Simon Armitage
Collected Poems, by Thom Gunn
Black Box, by Erin Belieu
Silence in the Snowy Fields, by Robert Bly
The Continuous Life, by Mark Strand
Made Flesh, by Craig Arnold
Rose, by Li-Young Lee
Refusing Heaven, by Jack Gilbert
Amplitude, by Tess Gallagher
Moon Crossing Bridge, by Tess Gallagher
Hinge & Sign, by Heather McHugh
Lucky Wreck, by Ada Limon
West Wind, by Mary Oliver
Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, by August Kleinzahler
Swithering, by Robin Robertson
A Painted Field, by Robin Robertson
What the Living Do, by Marie Howe
Given Sugar, Given Salt, by Jane Hirshfield
The October Palace, by Jane Hirshfield
Love Poems, by Anne Sexton
Wind in a Box, by Terrance Hayes
What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland
Donkey Gospel, by Tony Hoagland
Embryoyo, by Dean Young
Skid, by Dean Young
The Pajamaist, by Matthew Zapruder
Collected Poems, by Ciaran Carson
Your Time Has Come, by Joshua Beckman
Take It, by Joshua Beckman
Selected Poems, by James Tate
The Dream Songs, by John Berryman
Hoops, by Major Jackson
Lunch Poems, by Frank O’Hara
No Nature, by Gary Snyder
Green Squall, by Jay Hopler
The Cinnamon Peeler, by Michael Ondaatje
Book of Longing, by Leonard Cohen
Stranger Music, by Leonard Cohen
Actual Air, by David Berman
Migration, by W.S. Merwin
No Nature, by Gary Snyder
The Complete Poems: 1927 — 1979, by Elizabeth Bishop
Selected Poems, by James Schuyler

(I'm sorry, but I cannot possibly insert links to each title from the Powell's site - I'll be here for years! If you're in or near Cambridge, MA, check out the Grolier Poetry Bookshop for these, in Harvard Square! In person!)

I can't attest to how good these are due to my own ignorance, except for one or two (Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, for example). Christopher, however, saw the list and boldly one-upped Mr. Gordinier, mentioning poet Ellen Hinsey, and her two books: The White Fire of Time and Update on the Descent. Like a good, mature reader, Gordinier was not threatened by such a challenge, but rather appreciative of the suggestion. It didn't turn into some kind of online barroom brawl.

A more enterprising blogger would suggest a poetry reading group and even somehow convene a discussion, hosted by the blog, for a few of the titles. I don't know how to even begin such an effort, though it could be an intriguing idea if there's sufficient interest. I'll mull, you can mull, we can re-convene.

For now, happy reading and shopping, new poetry enthusiasts!

Writers as Activists

I am pretty delighted that writer and activist Sarah Schulman posted a video on her Facebook profile from the first OutWrite Conference, in 1990.

First, about Schulman. The link to her name is from a recent Salon article about her, which includes info on her new book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (New Press). The Salon article references a nice Q&A Publishers Weekly printed with the author, wherein Schulman confronts the ongoing reality of LGBT writers publishing books that openly deal with LGBT issues:

Gay press reviews have been superb, and I recently had a standing room only reading in Chicago. The excitement and embracing of the book’s ideas is very exciting. Ironically, of course, there has been a parallel blackout by the straight press. This interview is the very first engagement with a mainstream publication acknowledging that the book even exists. It’s a strange through-the-looking-glass experience, one that I have had all my life. It speaks volumes that work that LGBT people love and embrace is often ignored completely by mainstream institutions.

Schulman is quite an inspiring figure, who speaks with tough but plain language about ongoing oppression faced by not just LGBT folks, but all kinds of marginalized communities.

Back to the original video from the OutWrite conference in 1990. I have only listened to her talk, as she is first up on a panel that includes Essex Hemphill (a poet who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995), Pat Califia (lesbian writer at the time, who has since transitioned so is now a transmale), Susan Griffin, and John Preston (writer who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994). This panel was moderated by Roberto Belayo. As it states under this clip:

About Outwrite: "In 1990, the editors of OUTLOOK, a San Francisco-based magazine, conceived and produced the first OutWrite conference. The organizers of that inaugural event sought to bring together the mostly scattered threads of the queer writing community. The OutWrite conference created a place for literary lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered to meet, network, brainstorm, and do business en masse."

What prompted me to post was the end of Schulman's talk, her call-to-arms for writers in any marginalized community. I have transcribed this section, so apologies if I don't have every word correct. It is a powerful and angry call, meant for writers at a time when AIDS was running rampant through the LGBT community, with epicenters in NYC and San Francisco, but it can certainly be applied to other situations:

There is no book that got any drugs released, any drug trial open, or any service provided. Reading a book can help someone decide to take action, but it is not the same thing as taking action, and writing a book is not the same thing as taking action. The responsibility of every writer is to take their place in the vibrant, creative activist movements along with everybody else. The image created by the male intellectual model of an enlightened elite who claim that "their art work is their political work" is parasitic and useless for us.

At the same time, I don’t think that any writer must write about any specific topic or in any specific way. Writers must be free of formal and political constraints on their work so that a culture can grow in many
directions. But, when they’re finished with their work, they need to be at demonstrations, licking envelopes, and putting their bodies on the line like everybody else. We live in the United States of Denial, a nation where there is no justice. The way we get justice is by confronting the structures that oppress us in the manner that is most threatening to those structures. That means in person as well as in print.

I'm still thinking this through and putting it up against some of my favorite writers since literary biographies are a favorite genre of mine. But I wanted to share it widely, as I was immediately struck by the courage it took Schulman to stand before a crowd and say it, and to re-post now, almost 20 years later.

I also think this clip comes at an interesting point in publishing, when digital publishing can make the process of getting work out there easier. Ease of production and distribution can be incredibly useful for activists, just as mimeographs transformed activist work in an earlier era and eventually led to an explosion of zines. (For more on activists and technology, see Bob Ostertag's People's Movement, People's Press, a book I may have been involved with...) How do we use electronic resources for activist endeavors and maintain high standards so that artistic work can survive, and how do we ensure that truly high-quality artistic work comes to light and does not get lost in a glut of information and activist calls? How do we avoid, even within marginalized communities, a tyrant majority - something Schulman confronts in this talk, in reference to gay white men who have more resources than anyone else in the queer community - taking over and becoming the loudest and most visible voices for a marginalized community?

It's useful to pull from the past as we race so quickly forward, and think through the voice of those less heard as those so often heard rapidly acquire means to exploit the best of technology.

Sad Boston news, and Useful Best-Book Lists

It's funny how, when Christopher leaves the country, I suddenly find so much to blog about.

First, I'm sad to have confirmed what I'd suspected was going on: the great indie/activist South End Press has officially left the Boston area. They had talked about opening this NY office, but it wasn't clear whether they were moving all operations there. It seems they have. They are now housed at the Medgar Evers College of City University of New York and are working wtih the college’s Center for Black Literature and DuBois Bunch Center for Public Policy.

I'm particularly sad as the Press is named after my neighborhood, which is showing fewer and fewer signs of the activist spirit that was once so strong, having fallen victim to serious gentrification. I take refuge in that gentrification, I suppose, but I also find it deeply troubling. Alas, the Lucy Parsons Center - the "independent, non-profit, radical bookstore and community space" - remains in the 'hood... for now.

Having said all that, I hope the South End Press prospers in their new home and continues to publish amazing, important books.

I also wanted to post today about best-of lists that are more than just your typical best-fiction round-ups of the year (which are so dominated by the usual suspects, both in authors and in publishers). Though there isn't much more indie cred found in these lists, I did enjoy two somewhat different takes on this idea:

• The Guardian did a Best of the Decade list, including reviews of certain titles.
• Details did a list of The 25 Greatest Gen X Books of All Time, which was their effort to show that men do, in fact, read, and read somewhat widely. I was surprised by some choices - such as Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies - and disappointed in others - including Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors, which really is a fail, folks - but there was a lot to like on the list. (Thanks to Jeff Gordinier for giving me the heads-up about it, though they accidentally missed his own X Saves the World!)

For those who love to read every best-of-year book list you can find, head over to see the full list provided by Largehearted Boy. You can spend hours clicking away!

Publishers with Identities

Please don't think I'm over the whole non-profit community bookstore idea, because I ain't. This post, however, will be on a somewhat different topic. We here at SotB allow our sharp, analytical, ever-curious minds to wander.

And my mind wandered over to the Huffington Post, where I found this great piece by Eric Obenauf, one-half the brains behind indie press Two Dollar Radio. In this article, Obenauf explains how indie presses have created - and must create - identities for themselves, and in fact, these identities are now being marketed in creative ways to boost their sometimes thin bottom lines. Two Dollar Radio, like Small Beer Press and Featherproof Books, sells tee shirts to generate some income. (For shame - Obenauf did not link to these presses in his article. What's up with that?) I would add the very cool Moby Lives t-shirts from Melville House, one of which I am secretly hoping to find under the tree this year. 

Obeanauf explains why this works with indies, when it wouldn't work with corporate presses:

As a small press, it is much easier to craft an identity. If you buy a book published by an independent press, then chances are good you really did intend to buy that book. Either it was recommended to you by a friend, you read a review, or you discovered it on the shelf of an independent bookstore: small presses deploy no marketing sleight of hand, no clever gimmicks or paid product placement in order to finagle someone into buying one of our books. As a result, I would wager that consumers of small press books are more aware of who published the work than those of corporate presses, which makes it easier for an independent publisher to sell brand merchandise. I doubt anyone would buy a shirt that says "Random House" on it; it just isn't cool. Nor would it stand for anything: one person might stop you in the street imagining you share an affinity for raising the perfect dog, while another might be a John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut fan. But I've seen students at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, rocking McSweeney's shirts and I know their taste.

I love this point, because there is so much truth in it, and because it does signal a way forward in this world of soulless conglomerates and corporate houses chasing empty book ideas - blogs, reality stars, etc - instead of new and interesting work. 

In this holiday season, go forth, dear reader, and buy indie! Wouldn't the book nerd in your life love a tee shirt with a literary theme from a somewhat obscure press everyone the least bit interesting will wish they knew? Of course s/he would, and s/he deserves that.

Lambda Rising, RIP

Sorry for the one-two punch here, folks, but some sad news from bookselling to report: Lambda Rising, the wonderful, well-stocked, and lively gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (glbt) bookstore in Washington DC, is closing early in 2010. The story of this closing is recounted in three parts, starting here. In fact, the whole chain will now be closed, with the closing of the DC and Rehoboth Beach, DE store closings.

The three part story is worth reading, as it contains a lot of fascinating gay history. The owners accomplished so much in their 35 years opening and running these stores. In addition, Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising's founder and co-owner, saved the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in NYC from closing in 2003, though it, too, had to close its doors in 2009. In managing Lambda Rising, Maccubbin and his spouse, Jim Bennett, reached out to communities with no lgbt stores, setting up outlets in these communities to get gay-themed books to folks in those areas. They also kicked off DC Gay Pride before turning over the event to special organizers when it got too large.

It is also worth noting what they did to help lgbt literature across the board at a crucial time in our history:

In another effort to encourage writers and publishers to produce quality glbt books, in 1987 Maccubbin began publishing the “Lambda Book Report,” a bimonthly review of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender literature. That publication spawned the “Lambda Literary Awards.” The first “Lammys” were given out in a black-tie awards ceremony held in Washington DC in 1989. Lambda Rising continued to shepherd both the review and the Lammy awards until 1986 when it turned the whole program over to a new non-profit organization, the Lambda Literary Foundation, which continues to run the annual awards program today.

In 1987, the AIDS crisis was in full force and the backlast against the gay community was intense. The owners don't mention this context but I think it's well worth mentioning, as it makes their efforts that much braver, and important.

I'm so frustrated by these closures. I know lgbt publishing and activism has changed, but I also know that queer people look for homes when they go to new cities, and I fear the only place they will find such homes will be bars and clubs. Now I'm all for such venues, but there as to be more. And if those places can stay open, why can't bookstores?

I then go back to what I have wondered before: can't these places go non-profit and survive?

I'm going to look more into this idea, as I think it's a valuable discussion to have, beyond glbt bookstores. Fortunately, Chad Post over at the Three Percent blog provides a good starting place in this post on the very concept. He mentions in that post the non-profit bookstore Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee. Of course, this effort failed with the Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

More to come on this concept, as we cannot let community minded bookstores - lgbt, feminist, African American-oriented, etc - fall to the wayside in a crap economy. I will mention in closing, however, that Boston does in fact still have a terrific gay bookstore: Calamus Bookstore, run by the tireless John Mitzel. Visit online or in person and you won't be disappointed!

So much for breakfast

The Q&A with Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, in the NY Times Magazine this weekend, done by Deborah Solomon, is a brief but frustrating read. I give Solomon credit for being bratty, though clearly she kind of puts Bezos on the ropes throughout. Still, there's no getting around Bezos' quest for retail domination. It's been edited down so I wonder how the conversation actually went. Judging from the end result in the magazine, it was somewhat tense.

Bezos' defensiveness seems a bit feeble, with him dismissing products that could be better and coming up with rather pathetic reasoning. The Nook allows you to share a book (file) with someone else, something you cannot do with the Kindle. Bezos is unimpressed:

The current thing being talked about is extremely limited. You can lend to one friend. One time. You can’t pick two friends, not even serially, so once you’ve loaned one book to one friend, that’s it.

But that's still slightly better than the Kindle, for those keeping score.

Then he's asked about the limits of reading an electronic device in a place like the tub. His suggestion to get around this problem is partially an attempt at humor, I think, but also real. His suggestion for modifying one's device to make it more bath-friendly puts him in line with friends who get a device that's too cool for school. "Look at this new calculator! It does everything!" "But can you do basic addition?" "Oh yeah, you just have to type these extra codes, which are totally, um, easy, and turn off this function..."

What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?

I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub?

If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know.

At that point, he's just sounding bitchy.

And then he once again confirms my concern that places like Amazon are desperate for us readers to move to a digital platform, which would mean less warehouse space for Amazon, less laborers for Amazon (see Ted Striphas' book on this issue), and probably more profit. This smells like the dream of a self-fulfilling prophecy lies beneath it:

Of all the books that Amazon sells, what percentage are digital books?

For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books. It’s astonishing.

Astonishing, as if there are not major ads pushing the Kindle, including commercials on the tv. No, it's just what people want, right? Just like flat screen tvs and sports cars. It's demand - we retailers are just here to provide.

This isn't a man who loves books or ideas. This is a man who loves selling crap and making money. Books made him some money, but not enough, so he changed Amazon: as Solomon points out, Amazon is now "a retail omnivore that sells basketballs and vacuum cleaners and hamster food and everything under the sun." Then he found a way to increase book sales, by pushing an exclusive (and severely limiting) reading device and files to go on it.

I'm amazed that everytime I hear or see him speak, I get that same bad taste in my mouth. And then I go to Indiebound.

Sherman Alexie Strikes Again!

Sherman Alexie has again made his feelings about e-books known, now on The Colbert Report. (Link to Huffington Post) Alexie has made an appearance on this blog before, for the same reason: He hates the Kindle and other devices like it.

I like Alexie. I appreciate his humor in this interview, in the face of the idiocy of Colbert. (The act is getting tired.) I admire his commitment to his community, to books, to independent presses (he's published by Grove/Atlantic and publishes his poetry with Brooklyn independent Hanging Loose Press). He says a lot of useful things here. Someone like Alexie should use his pulpit to bring up concerns about electronic devices. But...

A few years ago, Christopher and I went to see Camille Paglia speak in Harvard Square. (Yes, Christopher and I do see each other in person occasionally, rather than only "seeing" one another here on SotB.) We both agreed that she was very entertaining, but once you give her comments a bit of thought, many didn't hold water. But the provocation was useful to push our thinking on issues. In the same way, I think Alexie's comments here are useful to start discussions. I don't agree that making books digital means the downfall of book culture. Many other factors have gone into the death of media around books. But good for him for talking about this death and airing his concerns, in a venue wherein he can reach many people who are not reading this or any other publishing blog.

And I was impressed to hear people applaud when he first mentioned his aversion to the Kindle.

Lastly, as an editor who just recently told two different authors that they each needed snappier conclusions to their book synopses, I must salute Alexie for a fantastic finish. Watch the whole 6 minutes to hear him nail it.

When you're done watching that and perhaps feeling a bit agitated, take a watch of this gorgeous video that Christopher emailed to me, which he wanted to post before flying the coop for Germany. It's called Going West, it was put together by Colenso BBDO in Auckland and animated by Anderson M Studio for the New Zealand Book Council, and it's really quite charming.

An Addiction Worth Having

I'm pleased to report that Jeff Gordinier was recently in touch with us, the good bloggers at SotB. For those of you not in the know, he is the author of X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking (Penguin paperback, pub'd in hardcover by Viking) and Editor-at-Large for Details magazine, which one might assume is a pretty badass job.

So Gordinier is successful and works with all these major NY publishers - Conde Nast, Penguin. But he still finds much to love in stupid old heavy impractical books, in particular, poetry. And he's happy to make that known, using the fame he's attained through these big publishers to talk about poets published across the publishing spectrum. For that, I give him respect.

But in addition, he's written about it in a pretty fun way. I appreciate him sending the link.

The story in question is this one, posted on the Poetry Foundation's blog under the headline, "Absolute Necessities: The recession confession of a poetry shopaholic." In this article, Gordinier talks about his addiction to poetry books, which he manages to find on any and every trip, from business trips across the country to his daily commute, rushing through Grand Central station. He can't help himself. And he wonders if he should be more frugal with this addiction in our current dismal economic era, when everyone is screaming out for cautious spending. 

It should go without saying that I was quite charmed by his reasoning:  

I justify my poetry slush fund in a variety of ways. I tell myself, for example, that buying a book of poetry constitutes a gesture of resistance. Gargantuan corporations can now cull, measure, and parse every move that we make in the global marketplace, but picking up a collection of verse is still so minuscule and arbitrary an act that it must surely defy all their algorithms—it feels as commercially untraceable as slipping an apple into your bag at an orchard. (For one thing, you’re not coerced into buying poetry because of, like, ads. You have to make a deliberate effort. You have to seek it out. And even in bookstores that do offer a diverse selection of poetry, merely finding it can pose a challenge: Invariably the poetry aisle is located way, way in the back—“yeah, just turn left at the Sasquatch section and it should be right across from Occult Interpretations of High School Musical.”) The publishing business relies on the massiveness of authors like Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown to such a degree that a stray underdog purchase of, say, Dean Young’sEmbryoyo barely even registers on their Reader Tracking Devices, and that’s what I love about it. It’s a tiny push in the opposite direction—a pipsqueak of peaceful defiance.

Now that's an argument I can get behind. This kind of call from an author published by a corporate house is reassuring to me. More authors need to take stock of their position and voice support for those writers who are not writing books popular with bigger houses.

So let's all remember, in this season of giving, that perhaps we should shop a bit less than we have in the past, but we should get meaningful gifts for those people who matter. Let's shop independents, and get books that connect with the reader, rather than just grabbing what's on the bestseller lists. This feels particularly resonant given the media's annual drunken celebration of Black Friday consumerism. Forget long lines at Best Buy and head over to your nearest independent bookstore.

I for one see Gordinier's article as serving, as well, as a useful guide for modern poetry, since this is a field that many of us find hard to get into due to our ignorance of what we might like. I think I'll start with Li-Young Lee, whom a friend of mine has loved for some time and whose poem "From Blossoms" Gordinier quotes as follows:

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. 

Can we ALL talk about this please?

I am worried that the discussion that should be started with the following link will not happen due to a certain holiday this week.

Michael Wolff has thrown something of a Molotov cocktail at the publishing world, and I'd happily stand out on the streets with him. In this article on Newser, Wolff calls for a book boycott, because, simply put, "Books are evil."

He takes issue with the many polibrity books - I'm trying to make up a term here that combines "politicians" and celebrities, people like Palin and Beck, whom he calls out, who claim to be political but are in fact vacuous, ill-informed, and tragically too deficient in a basic intellectual sense to be put in charge of so much as an ant farm. Will polibrity work?

Anyhow, these polibrities don't write books, they just put their brand on books that are written by others, who may or may not appear on covers. Wolff rightly points out that such books have been around for a long time, but were considered vanity books and not given any serious consideration. It was understood what they were, they had their readers, and the rest of us could move on with our lives. But now, the media does not discriminate. Oprah has Palin on to discuss her book, as if Palin herself actually wrote it and as if it contibutes anything to any larger discussion at all. It doesn't. It's a vanity book. It was written by someone hoping to please Palin, and it did, and Palin signed off on it. She's hardly even qualified to discuss it. In fact, she may not have even read it - she could have just paid a political handler to check it for her, just as you would a proofreader.

And then Wolff goes after the publishers - the cocktail is lit, and time for throwin'!

Publishers publish fake books because, if you have an “author” who has some larger cause to promote, the publisher gets free promotion. What the publisher has traded for such an abundance of promotion is its own brand. HarperCollins does not really believe Sarah Palin has written a valuable book—or even that it is really a book, not in the way that HarperCollins has historically understood books, or in the way that people have counted on HarperCollins to have understood a book. But, these are desperate times and real books are an increasingly equivocal proposition anyway, so almost all publishers are willing to engage in the strategic mix-up between real books and fake books.

Absolutely true, and we should hold these brands responsible. These corporate publishers say such books allow them to publish other, more literary fare, but this is bullshit. C'mon. You have a board demanding higher profit margins, and Palin will get you there. If you drop some money on a debut novelist, you are hardly excused for the damage you are unleashing on the world with this tripe.

Well done, Mr. Wolff. What next?!

(Thanks to the ever-reliable MobyLives for alerting me to Wolff's article.)

The Big Kids Have a Good Idea!

Sometimes here at SoTB, we get a little disenchanted with publishing, right? We just think screw it. Where is the hope? Where is the possibility? Where is the potential? In the world of corporate publishing, when independents are kicked around, when new and interesting voices are ignored, when the holidays we so love become merely an excuse to publish absolute tripe (and no, that link is not to a certain moronic Alaskan), what have we left?

But today's brief post is giving credit where credit is due.

Hachette Audio is releasing a new David Sedaris recording on vinyl, under the title Live for Your Listening Pleasure, reports Andrew Adam Newman in the NY Times. This seems like a great pairing of format and content to me offhand, even if I've grown a bit tired of Sedaris in recent years. Sure, an occasional article in the New Yorker can be fun, but page after page, he becomes a bit predictable. But hey, suddenly I'm interested anew.

As formats explode and everyone seeks out the Next Big Thing, I appreciate that this particular publisher is looking across all formats, old and new, to see what might work. I'm all for thinking aloud about formats that work and talking seriously about those that don't. In fact, Susan Ruszala has a nice post about hardcovers over at Follow the Reader worth reading. I just worry about our racing ahead and leaving valuable formats - such as vinyl - behind.

So well played, corporate giant Hachette. You could be onto something!

National Book Awards - and nice shout out

So the National Book Awards were presented last night. Winners:

Fiction: Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
(which pleases me as I'm reading Borstal Boy and feeling all Irish nationalist)

Non-Fiction: T. J. Stiles for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf)

Poetry: Keith Waldrop for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (Univ. of California Press)

Young People's Literature: Phillip Hoose for Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice (FSG/Kroupa)

Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Gore Vidal

The Literarian Award: Dave Eggers

The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction: Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories

Congrats to all!

But I also want to applaud Stiles, who reportedly did good:

Stiles said that books “are at the heart of our culture,” and went on to thank the vast army of workers—“ a complete eco-system” —that make books possible. “The editorial assistants, the copyeditors, the designers, agents, publicists, the guys in the mailroom, librarians—I hope e-books aren’t fooling us into thinking these people aren’t needed.”

I always appreciate when authors take advantage of an opportunity like this one to remind folks about all the good people who makes a great book possible.

I don't need a library in my pocket, thanks

And besides, "library in a pocket" just calls to mind the horrible school coaches in Texas that were forever accusing us pubescent boys of "shootin' pocket pool." It seemed annoying at the time, but as an adult, I look back at that as, in fact, quite inappropriate and foul.

Anyhow, I'm referring here to Motoko Rich and Brad Stone's article in yesterday's NY Times on electronic reading devices, which sought to understand the ways in which readers are consuming books electronically - on dedicated devices and on phones with book features (ie, iphone, i-touch, etc). It's nice to see that this is of such wide interest. I know NY Times readers are a fairly specific demographic, but this article is currently the number 2 most emailed article.

But I can't help but feel this lingering suspicion as I read the article...

My partner's contention is that people do not want e-readers as much as e-reader companies want people to want e-readers. He believes the companies are generating this hysteria falsely, creating the illusion of demand in order to create demand. Is he crazy, and is this theory crazy? Well to be honest, those are two separate questions, but I don't want to digress again, as I've already said too much re: school coaches, above.

This article supports his case. Yes, we have the "man on the street" voice, from Keishon Tutt, a pharmacist in TX; romance (e)novelist Shannon Stacey; admin assistant and blogger Sarah Wendall. But mixed in, we also get quotes from e-reader execs who are trying to casually explain the allure of their products:

“It’s a surprisingly pleasant experience to read on a small screen,” said Josh Koppel, a founder of ScrollMotion, a New York company that has made some 25,000 e-books available through Apple’s App Store and has sold more than 200,000 copies.

and

"The Kindle is for people who love to read,” Mr. Freed of Amazon said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

These quotes are provided as if the journalists ran into these folks on the F train and this topic kind of came up, perhaps with the opening line, "Whatcha reading, and on what device?"

I don't think we need to ban e-reading and insist on printed matter for all books. I really don't. But I'm not convinced that this demand is as real as these lobbyists of sorts want us to believe.

Here's another funny moment in this strange article:

According to the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, about 1.7 million people now own [a single-function e-reader], and that number could rise to four million by the end of the holiday season.

That's a huge increase. Is this a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? There is no other context, just this projection thrown into the mix.

Hey, if you're into e-reading, e-read away. Make yourself sick with it. But I continue to read these fluff pieces - which generated pretty strong responses questioning the thoroughness of Rich and Stone, the writers - with a fair amount of skepticism. I almost feel my lack of concern about attaining an e-reader runs counter to the underlying demand, and that suggests an article that is not, on the whole, balanced.

Only in Socialist FRANCE! Right?

Wrong.

Edward Cody has an article in the Washington Post that starts so sweet and, ya know, foreign. The lede is all about a funny li'l town square in Poligny, France, where "a bookstore has been dispensing culture and entertainment to the people of Poligny for 150 years." When it almost had to close due to financial pressures, the town rallied, "a group of townspeople put up cash to form a little corporation, capitalized at $70,000, and bought the lease to keep it running. As a result, the New Bookstore reopened two weeks ago with a coat of fresh paint but a familiar mission: to be a haven where people feel welcome dropping by to buy a ballpoint pen or browse for books."

Cody moves out from there, to show how France's insistence on keeping one leg in the past - with monuments and fine cheeses, etc - prevents it from modernizing and moving forward. It's an odd article. With subheads, this jump is clearly delineated: bookstore lede, France as old-fashioned and behind the times, innocently move back to specifics of bookstore. Something is amiss. Why bookend this story of France with a very specific article on a bookstore staying open due to committed townspeople?

Well the sandwich fillin' in this here story really speaks volumes about the bookstore story itself. By kind of counter-framing the narrative of the bookstore with this tangent on the French character that makes the case that "France must also go beyond its past because the world has largely moved on while France was stuck contemplating glories that were," our reading of the bookstore story becomes a joke. These townspeople saving this bookstore are clinging to a dying institution and preventing progress, just like the national response to Sarkozy's attempt to start a discussion about all the new immigrants became "focused on the need for new arrivals to adhere to values arising from France's past."

But wait... this happened here in the good ol' US of A just a few years ago, in fact in a place deemed too conservative, by many folks, to even warrant a mention unless there is a serious sneer involved.

In 2006, community members came together to keep Brazos Bookstore in my (kinda) hometown of Houston, TX open:

When owner Karl Kilian announced that he would have to sell the store or close because he was taking a position at the Menil Collection, a Houston museum, many wanted desperately to help. The problem, Moser said, was no one could take on the entire financial or operational commitment of a bookstore. However, one of the bookstore's champions, Gabrielle F. Hale, proposed the idea of forming a group to pool resources. Fourteen of the store's supporters each agreed to invest a minimum of $10,000 to keep the store open, according to Moser. At a party celebrating the deal, 11 additional partners signed on. The 25-member group formed Brazos Bookstore Acquisition, a limited liability corporation, with its chief investor, Edward R. Allen III, as president.

Sound familiar?

My point is that this idea isn't as radical and certainly not as backward as Cody presents it in the Washington Post article, and in fact should be considered a viable idea for other struggling independent bookstores around the country.

Let's not chalk this one up to crazy France, with it's baguettes in bike baskets, 6 week vacations, and constant cigarette smoking. We could all learn something from France - and from H-town.

For a good time, call a 1832 edition of Pride & Prejudice

Yes, of course Christopher's right. I'm anti-fun, while he's a good-time-aholic, rockin' the antiquarian book fair.* Check out this binding, bitches!

Anyhow, I'm here to tell you about something that's more suited for those with a pulse. My apologies it's so last minute - I only found out about this today.

Bookbuilders of Boston is hosting a talk entitled Beyond the Pitch Letter: A Roundtable with Authors, Agents, and Editors. I'm planning on attending so I have more to tell folks about this process, even if I ain't working with them. (I did this a lot at an academic conference this weekend, but more on that in another post.) (Except I will say that I loved DC as much as I thought I might.) The participants on the roundtable are:

• Ann Collette of the Helen Rees Literary Agency
• Self-promoting author extraordinaire Stephen Puleo (and I mean that in a good way - his book Dark Tide is worth all that promotion!)
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor Deanne Urmy
• Joanne Wyckoff, literary agent at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth
  

It should be a good time, but don't let me stop you from blowing dust off jackets and debating the best quality backstrips from 17th century editions. 

* For the record, I've actually attended and enjoyed this fair and my comments above are only here to irritate Christopher. If others get offended, it's merely friendly fire. My apologies.

Love to Local

I'm excited to be attending the Massachusetts Center for the Book's MA Book Awards ceremony at the State House here in Boston tomorrow (Wednesday, Nov 4). Little did I know, there was some excitement happening before the awards!

At 11 am, there will be a rally we should all consider attending. The Massachusetts Library Association is holding a “Don’t Close the Books on Libraries” Rally at the State House. If you love books, you should love libraries, and if you love libraries, you should fight against the severe budget cuts they face.

Before learning of this rally this evening, I stopped by the Harvard Bookstore and found, much to my delight, two novels by Charles Willeford, who was written about in Sean McCann's Gumshoe America, which I got out of a library btw, alongside Jim Thompson, thereby making me interested. (They both reflect the tragic loss of New Deal ideology in the face of liberalism, obviously.) What's amazing is that these two novels - High Priest of California and Pick Up - are together in one, reversible volume from the 1980s. Yes, folks, you read through one and come to 2 gray pages. Close the book, flip it over, and read the second. Just incredible. I sometimes love Harvard Bookstore's used section.

Now go rally for books, already! 

Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas

Perhaps I should start by saying outright that Columbia University Press' publicity department sent me a copy of this book. There, is everyone happy?

The book in question is The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, by Ted Striphas, who is Assistant Prof in the Dept of Communication and Culture and adjunct prof in American Studies at Indiana University. He also blogs about the issue he raises in the book here. (Points to Striphas for linking from his faculty page to his publisher's page rather than Amazon...) The book got a nice bump in attention when it was reviewed by publishing gadfly Richard Nash in The Critical Flame (an online literary journal started by Daniel Pritchard of publisher David Godine, blogger of The Wooden Spoon (where he's been posting a lot lately, and good stuff, too), and others). Okay, I think credit and links where such things are due are done.

The book is a pretty great read for all of us publishing / book nerds. Striphas takes us on quite a rollicking ride, from faux books to decorate shelves in the 1930s, as having books became a symbol of middle class identity, to very public controversies around Oprah's book club - James Frey, Jonathan Franzen, et al - to Amazon warehouses to the creation of the ISBN... it's all here, and it generally comes together. I applaud him being thorough even if it left the book not as much a page-turner in certain sections, but I don't go far enough to agree with Nash when he suggests frustration in referring to this book being "very much a university press book in structure." (God forbid anything be academic...)

Striphas uses all these episodes to illustrate where we are right now, in the "late age of print." This does not mean a final stage in print culture, before we pass into a digital one. The printed book and digital versions, generally captured under the umbrella term "e-book," complement one another, in Striphas' mind, and I can see his point. This book is not heavy on the kind of on-the-ground argument we're used to hearing, on blogs and in industry publications, but instead is slightly more philosophical in argument with very on-the-ground examples - making for a useful book as we weigh changes that are happening everyday.

I appreciated how often Striphas knocks down notions many of us cling to, or rather complicates them. He problematizes our general demonization of big box stores. He makes a point to capture the past failures of e-books in many variations to take off. He won't let us just take a stand and run with it, but as any good scholar, he instead teases out the finer points. Perhaps some readers will find this frustrating, as if he's holding them back from strong feelings that will make change. I don't feel held back, however, just better informed. I see his point about big boxes, but I also find myself looking for hope when I hear about B&N closing stores in the future. Maybe indies will spring up in their place, and I can't help but think that will be better for communities. The reality is, smaller communities may not be able to support an independent bookstore, and without a B&N, people may just move online for book purchases.

So read the book, get educated, but stay angry - that's my short and sweet review of The Late Age of Print.

Why I'm Hopeful

I have a bit of optimism today due to the incredible turn-out at the Boston Book Festival in Copley Square. Despite some rain and intense wind, even the tents outside were crowded - and not just for the free coffee and ice cream hand-outs. There was a huge line for Ken Burns, who was signing books, and crowded booths for Symposium Books, the New York Review of Books, writers' meeting and training org Grub Street, and Brattle Bookshop (which has a nice Twitter feed on their site!). The events themselves, held in multiple venues in very close proximity throughout the day, were completely swamped. I tried to get into a talk moderated by novelist Jennifer Haigh and I was turned away because it was full. I ran into a former colleague who was standing in a huge line to see Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, and she reported that an earlier event she attended had an overflow crowd in a second, standing-room-only room.

It was incredibly gratifying. People in Boston care a lot about books, reading, and writing. 

It was particularly gratifying following the scene on CNN I witnessed while working out just before heading to Copley Square. Ivanka Trump was being interviewed in support of her new book, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life, proudly published by Touchstone. She's 27 years old and sees this book as a peer-to-peer book to young people, especially (but hardly limited to) young women, just entering the workforce and going through all those early experiences - interviewing, entering an older workforce as a young person, etc... 

To put it mildly, this is not a book worth publishing. This is a privileged child who has followed in her offensive father's footsteps. There is something a little weird about a kid who doesn't rebel, but that weirdness becomes dangerous when the parent is Donald Trump and the kid is explaining that real estate investments a few years ago were a bad idea, but now as the economy is in the crapper, it's time to "shore up your resources and take advantage" of the low market. 

CNN mentioned that she's getting married this weekend to "millionaire publisher Jared Kushner." I'm always amazed to see words like "millionaire" or "wealthy" or "not mired in debt" next to words like "publisher" or "editor." Turns out, Kushner is publisher of the New York Observer, based of course on his family. These people live in an alternate reality. (The Wikipedia snarkily mentions that his family gave ample sums of money to Harvard and NYU, where Kushner "earned" his undergrad and law/business degrees, respectively.)

Later, I got home from the Book Fest only to have my partner emerge from the bathroom with a copy of the Oct. 19th issue of the New Yorker. (For the record, I do not condone reading in the bathroom.) He hands me the issue featuring an article titled "The Gossip Mill" by Rebecca Mead, all about Alloy Entertainment. It's quite a fascinating look into a seriously successful book packaging firm, which actually packages concepts for YA audiences, for books, tv, film, whatever. The guys running it and their female staff - a nice posited fact that is not pursued, as it needn't be - are portrayed as a bit vapid, which is probably fair. The meetings come across like a bad joke - pick something in the paper or randomly from pop culture and think about how it can be translated for kids, in the dumbest way possible. 

I don't know how worthwhile it is to complain about Alloy in particular, but the article does demonstrate the kind of short term thinking that passes for editorial process in some NY houses. These are not books built to last, they are books built to become trendy and sell. Let the idea run its course and, hundreds of Sweet Valley High books later, move on. But as the publishing industry reels from changes in the economy and the culture of reading, these kinds of products - Gossip Girl, Ivanka Trump's trash - seem unnecessary, clogging up the pipeline and making the books the rest of us low paid suckers are trying to publish that much more obscure.

But really, I'm optimistic! I promise.

Publishing overload

Not only am I overwhelmed at work, but I'm also overwhelmed by publishing news. I can't follow it all! There is...


- the endless chatter about the Amazon vs Walmart vs Target vs Sears - SEARS?! - price gouging with bestsellers. It's kind of turning back on itself as indie booksellers go from frustration to a kind of Zen-like attitude. From Shelf Awareness:

Arsen Kashkashian, inventory manager at the Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo., writes:
Perhaps the price wars are really a positive thing for independent bookstores. We are looking at canceling our orders from the publishers on these books and ordering them from Amazon, Wal-Mart or Target. We will save almost $10 per book on some of the titles. I figure we can cut our billing by close to $1,000 and offer our customers significant savings while still maintaining a healthy margin. If these companies want to become wholesalers at a loss why should we discourage it?

Deb Sullivan, co-owner of the Book Oasis, Stoneham, Mass., writes:
As a very small retailer of new hardcover releases, I'm embarrassed to say I might consider buying them from a big box at these prices. Why would I want to be forced into buying case quantities of hot titles when I only want three? With free shipping, I can still sell them at 30%-40% off cover and make a profit while getting customers into my store that will hopefully buy other full price items or more profitable second-hand titles.

Fair enough!

- Cory Doctorow is now an author trying to give books away for free. Actually, this article does a fine job of making sense of how giving stuff away for free can still allow for revenue, even if Doctorow's case is a bit funky.

- I would say MobyLives has the best write-up of B&N's new e-reader, the Nook. Melville House's Dennis Johnson is right - "worst product name in recorded history."


- I haven't even processed Marion Maneker's article with the cheaply provocative headline: It's the End of the Book World as we Know It. I don't think I disagree with it whole hog, but who has time to know for sure?!


- I still haven't read Richard Nash's presentation from Frankfurt, or had a chance to check in with his new creation, Cursor. (Points for the name, though.)


- I really want to go to the Whitney to see Steve Wolfe's exhibit, but I also wouldn't mind someone building me a book tree.




Okay, egads... back to editing!

AIDS is over

It's been a crazy last week, but I wanted to post after attending an incredible conference in pieces on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of last week.

The conference was held in conjunction with an exhibition at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts titled ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS, 1987–1993. This exhibition and conference seemed to generate very little media, but I don't know if that is despite efforts from the organizers or due to their focus being on within Harvard. If it's the latter, it's a damn shame. I would highly recommend a visit to the Carpenter Center to see this exhibition, which includes plenty of great posters and pamphlets from ACT UP New York, produced in conjunction with the group's groundbreaking and often effective AIDS activism. Also set up as part of the exhibition is a sea of monitors playing the interviews Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard have conducted about this work, as part of the oral history they are still producing. (For those unable to make it to the Carpenter Center, click through the link to see the interviews online and find out more about this great - and important - project.)

How does this relate to publishing though?

If you read some of Schulman's writing, you will see her constant fight to get published as a queer woman writing about queer people. And at the conference, you could hear underlying much of this struggle the way in which the media, including book publishers, ran hot and cold on AIDS. ACT UP was a grassroots movement that became hip and got the attention of the mainstream media, and helped launch some incredible and important people and books into the national spotlight. But at some point, the publishers had to look for the Next Big Thing, the demographic of choice for the typical book buyer who was willing to shell out money.

Many minorities can tell this tell - black women have had their day, as have Indian writers. Publishers chase non-fiction in the form of memoir, typically, as well as fiction. But they move on. This isn't political publishing, this isn't commitment to a group or cause. This is chasing a buck.

The AIDS publishing fad, which produced such books as Paul Monette's heartbreaking Borrowed Time, was dangerous, because it was playing with lives. Bringing attention to this disease and the devastation it was causing, particularly among gay men in urban centers, was vital for survival, and when corporate publishing decided it wasn't earning out and left it, many were left in the wake of this fad. Some might argue that once the face of AIDS realistically was not as much artistic young gay white men but in fact people of color, increasingly women of color, people who were poor... it just did not sell as well.

This is where independent publishing becomes more than just hip or funky. It becomes integral for keeping voices in the world of books in the form of memoirs, fiction, poetry, and informational books. At the same time, university presses have done an incredible job saving the history of AIDS activism during the early onset of the disease. This is why universities need to support their publishers and step aside to allow independence on their part, so editors can pursue projects left aside by corporate publishers chasing a buck and overlooking issues with serious impacts on the lives of many of us.

And now I have to chase some projects to see if I can contribute to salvaging some history!

One Crass Dracula

I just read a Q&A in Entertainment Weekly with Dacre Stoker, great-grandnephew of Bram, and I had to post. Sadly, I don't believe the Q&A, from the 10.16.09 issue, is posted online. 

It seems ol' Dacre felt it was time to write a sequel to Dracula, titled Dracula the Un-Dead. I must salute the person conducting this interview, Kate Ward, for letting the author hang himself by his own rope. His answers basically sum up most of what is wrong with corporate publishing. This is how books get written too often now, and as readers, we have got to NOT support it! (In this case, we have Dutton Books, part of Penguin, to thank.)

It starts right out the gate. Ward asks why Dacre wrote a sequel, and he explains,

We grew up thinking, Isn't it too bad that the copyright was lost in the 1930s? Everybody else has been able to take what Bram created and go in a million directions with it. And that's good and bad.

Ward later points out that, despite Dacre's claim that he and his co-author, screenwriter Ian Holt, tried to honor Bram in writing this, Dacre made this novel in third person rather than using the journal format used by Bram, to which Dacre replies,

We just said, "We're going to make it an exciting book because that's what people want these days." Kind of like a Dan Brown thriller, or Tom Clancy, or Clive Cussler. A real page-turner.

Ward also asks about how they wrote about sex in this book, which apparently is described quite overtly. Dacre explains, "We felt if we didn't make it juicy, people would go, 'Oh, this is boring.'"

And finally, Ward hands this guy the noose by asking if he's trying to capitalize on "the vampire craze":

Ian and I met about six years ago, but we had other things going on. When [the craze] was just beginning to pick up, we said, "You know what? We better get this thing done."

And there you have it. He was not savvy enough to hide his motivation here, to take advantage of a very current craze by creating a rip-off of something with pop culture resonance that appeals to the most common reader possible, with no effort at crafting something literary or lasting. I greatly appreciate this man's honesty, even if his publicist and editor don't.

Why Should We All Get Along?

As soon as someone trots out that tired old Rodney King reference - "Why can't we all just get along?" - you know there's trouble. Chances are, the person using it is trying to take the air out of her or his opponent's sail and quiet a whole debate, and usually that person is the person who is on the side with more to preserve, if not gain. (I'm not saying this was the case with King himself - the phrase has clearly taken on a life of its own after the single, bizarre media moment.)

I read, then, Steve Ross' piece in the HuffPo with some skepticism. Ross is of course the former president of Collins within that beast known as HarperCollins, who recently lost his job in the re-org. He is a publishing veteran and probably a fine guy, and I did agree with some of what he said, but I disagree with his attempt to tamper down disagreements about e-books, and I can't sympathize when he whines, "at a time when it is in the best interests of everyone who loves books to help the major houses endure, they're being scapegoated, demonized and ridiculed for trying to survive with the crippling business model they've been handicapped with for decades." In his defense, however, he does come back around to explain why these big houses are screwed, and in fact manages to throw in some digs at the owners of these houses by noting "the audacious and perpetually unrealistic demands of the parent company for a 12 percent return on investments."

I also appreciate him calling out Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, for his post about the need for $4 books. I agree with Ross that this post is fallacious and simplistic, dressed up to appear straight forward. Ross pulls out details to show Coker's inaccuracies, with the larger message that Coker has a dog in the fight. Some of his one or two-sentence paragraphs do contain some logic and make useful points, such as when he states, "Lower cost ebooks help publishers retain customers who might otherwise abandon books altogether in favor of lower cost alternative media options." But then, as Ross points out, he says things that are just plain false, such as, "Since it costs the author or publisher next to nil to "print" each copy of an ebook, ebooks are extremely profitable on a per-unit basis, even at a low selling price." I can tell you from working at small publishing houses that converting files into digital formats can be costly and labor intensive. But again, dog in the fight.

Ross frustrates me with his feeble defense of corporate publishing, because he wants us to change our focus. Don't worry about the owners, whom I too can't stand, but think of the people: "Why do we demonize publishers as greedy, monopolistic and backward when they are peopled by such idealists and lovers of literature trying their best to navigate a ship that was corroding from decades-old rust well before the economic collapse placed icebergs in the water?" This might be neoliberalism, though it's too early in the morning for me to tease out why and how. I just know it's short-sighted and, again, meant to merely silence critics. Ross wants to make salient points about posts and publishing, but would rather others just run out to a chain and buy a Random/Harper/S&S book already - for the industry's good.

I can't help but mention this post over at HuffPo's competitor, Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, wherein Lloyd Grove uncovers some nasty news: Sarah Palin's editor at HarperCollins, Adam Bellow (yes, Saul's son), was co-author on a joke book Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles last year, during the election. Grove describes the book:

Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles—which has a cover featuring a Photoshopped governor in skin-tight leather and brandishing an automatic weapon—is a sophomoric send-up of Palin and her family, featuring digitally altered images and derisive captions, and packaged in a 5-by-7-inch, 96-page trade paperback. A representative gag: Palin’s face superimposed on a painting of Joan of Arc, with the mocking commentary: “In between junior high and high school, Sarah heard God's call to save France.”

Welcome to corporate publishing, Ms. Palin! The good (or not), the bad (her new one), the ugly (this pathetic joke book) - all under one big flashy roof! Suffice to say, Bellow wouldn't 'fess up, since he's obviously too busy bragging about the complete trash he's just edited that is number one at Amazon. Thanks for helping make Going Rogue a reality, Bellows!

I suppose it makes sense that Ross, someone from HarperCollins, which insists on publishing whatever can make the most money regardless of the ideological beliefs of the authors, should argue for us all to get along.

Pshh, forget it.

Great Internet Burning Panel

I mentioned the Great Internet Burning Panel held in San Francisco last month, sponsored by Books Inc. It sounds like it was, well, hilarious. It was billed as a one-sided event, clearly:

"When I think of Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit,” says Alan Kaufman, poet and editor of the Outlaw Bible series of anthologies. It has been clear for many years that the Internet has been changing the book business, but according to Kaufman and this panel of outlaw thinkers, Peter Maravelis, Peter Plate, Herbert Gold, Ethan Watters, and Brenda Knight, the change amounts to nothing less than wholesale destruction. Join them to learn more about the problem and find out how to fight back.

Some folks like Axel Feldheim didn't blindly agree but were still had a good time:

The panel was prejudiced & condescending. Herbert Gold quipped, "The computer is a really useful tool. I wish I had one." Peter Plate correlated the rise of texting with the fall of teenagers' vocabularies. Brenda Knight admitted that she wouldn't hire someone who played MMORPGs, because they wouldn't be able to do the things expected of them. I disagreed with everything the panelists said, & I found the discussion absolutely engaging.

I was sad to see on this post that "about 25 people plus one occasionally restless dog" attended. I'd like to think more people would be interested, but hey, I still read printed books! What the hell do I know?

I originally read about the panel over at Shelf Awareness, which described it at a bit more length:

Kaufman began by reading an essay soon to be published in Barney Rossett's Evergreen Review, which is now an online-only publication, he noted. "The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now der Book," he read. "High-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle."He called the book a "sacred object" and admitted he might be crazy for resisting an e-book-only world, but said: "I will fight it. I will resist. For not only is this effort at consolidation of the world's literature into the hands of a single central repository a demoralizing cultural prospect, but it is a move towards a new form of high-tech totalitarianism."

Peter Plate disagreed--somewhat. He pointed out that all technologies, social and political interactions and life itself are "always at the service of language." He continued: "Language, regardless of the technology, is in the hands of readers and writers, and it cannot be reduced."

Ethan Watters said he did not see parallels to the Holocaust and thought technology offers some democratizing opportunities. But he does worry, he went on, about some of the trends and does not want to see blogging replace the thoughtful work in books. He observed that right now some of the best bloggers are skilled, former magazine writers. What about the next generation?

"I think we need to have an electronic civil rights movement," said Brenda Knight. She noted that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google's purpose was to help people decide what kind of lives they want to live. To much applause from the audience, she asked, "Doesn't that sound like control to anyone?"

Herb Gold remembered fondly the time when literary writers were rock stars and lamented a technological world where casually finding out what those around you are reading is impossible. You can't exactly go up to someone reading a Kindle and ask what they are reading, he pointed out.

It was a cranky, contentious panel, to be sure, with exaggerations thrown around demanding debate.

I appreciate that folks are airing the concern about control, as the debate on e-books and digitized platforms is so often framed as the great democratizing of the reading experience. In some cases, this may be true, but too often, corporations like Amazon pick up this same rhetoric and throw it around, creating the exact opposite situation where the folks at Amazon dictate what you can and can't read, on a device they have trademarked within an inch of its life. Now they are going international. America exporting its finest, as ever! Now you can download a book on Amazon while waiting at a drive-thru at McDonald's, in downtown New Delhi. Fantastic. This BusinessWeek article by Olga Kharif even opens,

Nearly everyone I know who owns a Kindle travels internationally. So Amazon’s latest move, to allow e-reader buyers to download e-books wirelessly not only in the U.S. but also in more than 100 other countries comes as no surprise. Amazon is simply trying to increase the device’s appeal to its core, business traveler market segment.

So as you're flying overseas to train workers at a phonebanking operation where you've outsourced labor, you can enjoy the convenience you've become accustomed to at home?

Let's talk revolution in books, in a way that isn't so easily cooptable. No, I'm not talking Nazi talk as used by Alan Kaufman. That's a bit much. But let's remember the great potential of the book in its present form and expand it in a sensible way that does not play into the hands of feverish capitalists invested in destroying small, independent businesses and free-thinking. Sound good? Good.

ADDENDUM: Alan Kaufman was sweet enough to send me a link to his Evergreen Review essay. Now you can enjoy his thoughts in their full, proper context. Thanks again, Alan!