Turn Away

"'Nearly a third of self-published ebooks are “erotica,' according to a new analysis from Digital Book World and the Book Genome Project, compared with about 1% of traditionally published ebooks.

     What’s more, nearly 10% of that subset of self-published ebooks has themes of incest or bestiality.
     How big of a problem is this for ebook retailers?
     'It obviously matters when you are perceived as being a wholesome, family oriented, though declining brand like WHSmith,' said Andrew Rhomberg, an ebook observer and founder of ebook discovery start-up Jellybooks, referring to the British ebook retailer that shut its digital doors last week temporarily until it had cleaned its shelves of much of its erotic content, adding, 'but should Amazon worry, probably not.'
     While 'electronic books' have been around in some form or another since the 1980s, they did not rise to commercial prominence in any form until 2007 at the introduction of the Kindle. Perhaps the ebook business is going through the same kind of growing pains the Internet as a whole had around adult content in the first five or six years of its commercial existence."
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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they want it both ways...

"[...] Amazon and others are 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' by removing too much of the self-published erotic content and complains that Amazon in particular is not giving authors sufficient explanation as to why their ebooks are being taken down. Another post at International Business Times reports on how readers of such content are up in arms, too, signing a petition to have content reinstated at their favourite ebook retailers. (Kobo seems to be at the centre of this scandal and has recently released a letter explaining its position and what it’s doing about it.)

     Each of these retailers have policies on what kind of content authors can publish and sell with them. [...] Barnes & Noble says in its content guidelines that it may remove any book that 'graphically portrays sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal.'
     Amazon’s policy is similar: 'We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts. What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.'
     That would mean Fifty Shades of Grey, last year’s mega-best-seller (and the fastest selling book of all time), could be removed, which begs the question, who gets to decide what is and is not sold in bookstores?"
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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power reading... with 2013 Man Booker Prize judge Natalie Haynes

"Voldemort, Jeff Bezos and Darth Vader walk into a bar..."

From: verging on pertinence

"My anti-Amazon stance once made my sister cry. It was Christmas morning. She was talking enthusiastically about her Kindle and the freedom it gave her to read books and newspapers from around the world. I pounced, scolding her for supporting the Voldemort of the book industry.

     Didn’t she know Amazon was destroying our independent bookstores through its loss-leading low prices? Or that by locking Kindle users into buying from Amazon, and preventing them from easily reading their purchases on, say, the Kobo or Sony Reader, it had created a 'walled garden' that was giving it a frightening ebook market share (an estimated 60% in the US and 80% in Australia)?...
     [But] gradually, and very much in denial about it all the while, I have turned into my worst nightmare: an independent bookstore-loving bibliophile who shops mostly at Amazon.
     Whatever you do, please don’t tell my sister."
— Charlotte Harper, The Guardian
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Dross vs. Dreck

From: Bad Book Covers

"[…] For one thing, most contemporary literary fiction is terrible: mannered, conservative and obvious. Most of the stories in the annual best-of anthologies are mediocre, as are the stories that populate most magazines. It’s inevitable that this should be so; fiction writing is ludicrously popular, too many people are doing it, and most of them are bound to be bad at it. MFA programs, while of great benefit to talented writers, have had the effect of rendering a lot of lousy writers borderline-competent, and many of these competent writers get stories and books published. (This is not an anti-MFA rant: I loved the program I studied in, and love the one I teach in, and enjoy helping students do their best, even when it doesn’t end up being very good.)

     As a result, the dialogue literary fiction writers are having with themselves is, by and large, uninteresting. It isn’t that there aren’t smart people writing and conversing, it’s just that the lit-fic world is so enormous that the noise tends to overwhelm the signal."
— J. Robert Lennon, Salon
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"With the massive swell in self-publishing on the Kindle platform, these lists are getting very swollen indeed – and with the tiny price tags attached to the work of no-name authors, the temptation to play supermarket sweep when browsing can become irresistible.
     I am an avid reader of science fiction, and I have recently developed a guilty pleasure whenever I run out of reading material: performing late-night trawls of the genre’s bestseller list on the Kindle store, and picking up six or seven extremely cheap books that seem to be being read and enjoyed by the masses, all by authors I have never heard of.
     Most are mediocre – either bloated short stories that appear to have been proofread by drunks, or cliché-ridden hatchet jobs written in an attempt to jump on the rusty and creaking post-apocalyptic fiction bandwagon. But at 70p or £1.50 a pop, one can hardly feel cheated."
— Fred Crawley, The New Statesman
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For more about Garry Killworth, go here...

Whither goest thou?

From: printingchoice

"Buoyed by the success of e-readers like Kindle and Amazon's direct publishing online system, budding authors are sowing a direct relationship with their readers and reaping better royalty payments in return.
     "Writers don't need publishers anymore," says Joel Naoum, publisher at Momentum, a digital-only part of Pan Macmillan Australia, launched earlier this year. "The new technology allows writers to distribute directly and I think it's a fantastic development for us all."
     "It means publishers have to try harder to provide value to writers and that publishers aren't accused of being 'gatekeepers' quite as often."
     Royalties for self-publishers are generally much more attractive for those selling an e-book directly to the reader. Percentages vary, but an author will typically earn $2.66 from a $25 hardback, 68c from an $8 mass market paperback, or $1.49 for a trade-published e-book."
— Matt Smith, The Sydney Morning Herald
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Hard, Soft and Unbound

From: The Upcoming

For better or worse, digital technology has permanently blurred the boundaries between the professional and the amateur. Whether it be in the gilded (and guilded) domains of accounting, law, design, or even medicine (you can now buy a cheep machine to analyze your own DNA); so why not publishing? — Michael Hale

"Attendance figures for the 2012 London Book Fair won’t be released for weeks, until the numbers are audited, but judging from the fairly strong traffic in the main hall (along with a large China contingent), it seems likely this year’s attendance will top the 24,802 who came to last year’s event. But one new exhibitor stood out at this year’s fair: Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.
     With a booth nicely situated near the Digital Zone theatre, Amazon saw steady traffic, answering questions for potential authors, and making some of their most successful self-published authors available to talk about their experiences. 'It’s been great,' Atif Rafiq, general manager of Amazon’s KDP unit, told PW, noting steady traffic at the booth, good attendance at a one-hour session on Monday afternoon, and overflow attendance at two short presentations in the Digital Zone Theatre. It was Amazon KDP's first time at the fair, and Rafiq said Amazon KDP would also exhibit at the upcoming BookExpo America in New York in June.
     Amazon’s presence was part of a noticeable increase in the amount of programming geared toward self-publishing at this year’s fair. At the Author Lounge in Earls Court 2, roughly half of the programs focused on self-publishing, with titles like: Why Self-Publishing Is Not Only the Future but the Present; Serious Self-Publishing from Manuscript to Market; and E-Books for the Self-Published Author. Authors have always come to the London Book Fair, although not in large numbers—just 1,039 attendees of the nearly 25,000 who came to London in 2011 identified as authors. But as technology makes publication easier, and marketing more effective, that number appears poised to grow, whether to learn best practices or new skills, to potentially meet an agent, or, to find an alternate route to market, whether Amazon, or Lulu.com."
— Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly
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Authors Be Gone

From: CoverBrowser

"It's easy to see the positive in the Department of Justice's decision to file a lawsuit against publishers and Apple over ebook pricing: it means cheaper ebooks, right? And an end to the shadowy publisher/Apple conspiracy to, according to the DoJ, 'end ebook retailers' freedom to compete on price, take control of pricing from ebook retailers and substantially increase the prices that consumers pay for ebooks.'
     Amazon was certainly quick to rejoice, releasing a statement calling the settlement 'a big win for Kindle owners,' and saying that it looks forward 'to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books.' [...]
     The DoJ lawsuit plays, it seems to me, right into the hands of Amazon. Yes, we'll have cheaper books, but at what cost? Is it worth paying a little bit less for a title if it threatens the future existence of the publishers who are bringing us the books? Or will we be happy getting everything we read from a vastly reduced pool of presses?
     Authors Guild president – and fantastic writer – Scott Turow says the US 'government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition. This would be tragic for all of us who value books and the culture they support.' "
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"[...] But now, with e-books, the chickens are coming home to roost. In February, veteran author Jim C. Hines discovered that Amazon had discounted his $2.99 e-books to 99 cents, cutting his royalties in the process. Jim tried in vain to discover why Amazon had done this. One Amazon rep told him that the company reserved the right to re-price their e-books ('...sole and complete discretion to set the retail price at which your Digital Books are sold through the Program'). Jim made a stink, and another rep got in touch with him to say that in his case, they’d lowered the price because they had out-of-date information about how he priced his books in the Kobo store.
     This is what DRM enables. Imagine Amazon and other platforms all reserving the right to lower your e-book prices to match a competitor’s lowest advertised price. Imagine if Amazon decided to cut your $3.99 book to 99 cents for a promotion (while paying you royalties on $3.99 for the duration of the promotion). Its competitors would soon notice that Amazon is advertising your book at 99 cents and invoke their right to price match. The upshot: your book is never going back to $3.99, ever. Such baked-in price matching would have the effect of making all price drops permanent."
— Corey Doctorow, Publishers Weekly
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paper/back/lash

"Amazon.com removed more than 4,000 e-books from its site this week after it tried and failed to get them more cheaply, a muscle-flexing move that is likely to have significant repercussions for the digital book market.
     Amazon is under pressure from Wall Street to improve its anemic margins. At the same time, it is committed to selling e-books as cheaply as possible as a way to preserve the dominance of its Kindle devices.
When the Kindle contract for one of the country’s largest book distributors, the Independent Publishers Group, came up for renewal, Amazon saw a chance to gain some ground at I.P.G.’s expense.
     'They decided they wanted me to change my terms,' said Mark Suchomel, president of the Chicago-based I.P.G. 'It wasn’t reasonable. There’s only so far we can go.' [...]
     I.P.G. told its publishers to immediately begin stressing that their books were available in other electronic formats, including from the Amazon rivals Barnes & Noble and Apple. It also told them to contact their local independent bookstores and point out that they could now sell something that Amazon would not."
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times/Bits
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Buy all the books Amazon doesn't have here...

Paper Backlash

From Samuel Johnson's  A Dictionary of the English
Language (1755) Internet Archive

"Canada’s Indigo Books and Music has joined forces with U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble in refusing to stock or sell any books published by online rival Amazon.com – including upcoming titles by James Franco, Deepak Chopra and Ian McEwan – with both chains now accusing the online giant of using predatory tactics that weaken an already struggling book industry. [...]
     The three-chain defensive front is the first setback Amazon has experienced since it began its aggressive and highly publicized move into the business of producing as well as selling books last year. Among the other authors whose upcoming work will become inaccessible to the majority of North American book buyers as a result of the ban are actor/director Penny Marshall, self-help writer Timothy Ferris and politician Ron Paul."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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"Kindle is an ingeniously sly name, because it’s designed to connote a variety of 'warm' feelings, including 'kin' (for cozy associations; Kindle’s one of the family—that cyborg cousin from your father’s side); 'kindred' (think of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, kindred spirits!); 'kindling' (ahh—a natural reference: kindling wood to start a fire, and wood also makes paper); and 'kindle' itself (to illuminate [knowledge?]; to light)."
— Miss Cavendish
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Books in a Bind

"Kobo's decision to enter into competition with its own suppliers further complicates relations already strained by the decision of its part-owner, Indigo Books and Music, to promote Kobo e-readers aggressively in stores formerly dedicated exclusively to selling traditional books.
     Thousands of bookstores across North America have closed in the course of the digital revolution, falling prey first to online book sales and more recently to e-books that can be delivered automatically to such devices as the Kobo and Amazon’s market-leading Kindle. Some fear that traditional publishers will be the next to suffer as online operators move onto their turf.
     But Writers’ Union of Canada chair Greg Hollingshead welcomed the news, saying the new competition could encourage traditional publishers to pay more for electronic rights and to stop forcing authors to do 'what publishers are supposed to do – editing and promotion.'
     Traditional publishers generally remit 25 per cent of a book’s cover price as a royalty to authors, while Amazon pays as much as 70 per cent, according to Hollingshead. If the new e-publishers make good on their promise, he added, 'conventional publishers will need to look hard at how they treat authors and how they compete in the digital market.' " — John Barber, THE GLOBE AND MAIL
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Read more about Kobo here...

Hard Times — media meltdown

From: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page

"[Household Words was a] Weekly magazine which Dickens edited along with sub-editor W. H. Wills. Charles' father, John Dickens, also had editorial duties on the magazine. Dickens received a salary and additional payments for his own contributions. The weekly contained topical journalism, essays, short fiction, and poetry by a total of 380 contributors. It was published every Wednesday at a cost of twopence and consisted of 24 pages of double columns without illustration. The magazine proved a financial success with sales reaching 100,000 weekly. Although serial publication was not planned for the journal, Dickens published his novel Hard Times in Household Words in order to bolster sales during a period of reduced profit. Dickens' total contribution to the weekly included 108 full-length essays and articles, co-writing another 45. After quarreling with his publisher, Bradbury and Evans, Dickens discontinued Household Words and the journal was incorporated into a new weekly, All the Year Round. 31 of the articles Dickens wrote for Household Words were published as Reprinted Pieces in 1858. [...]
      Dickens' successor to Household Words took the same format as its predecessor. Dickens contributed less material to All the Year Round than he had for Household Words, although he did serialize A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in the weekly. Dickens owned 75% of the venture and served as editor until his death in 1870 at which time his son Charley took over as editor until 1888. The magazine ceased publication in 1893. A collection of the sketches Dickens wrote for All the Year Round were later published as The Uncommercial Traveller."
— David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page
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"Make no mistake: as in every previous IT revolution, there will be (already is) a creative dividend. For instance, the print boom of 1590-1610 liberated Shakespeare and his successors, from Jonson to Donne, and sponsored an explosion of ephemeral publications, the inky compost that would nurture the best of the Jacobeans. Similarly, in Edwardian London, new media shaped the careers of Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and countless others. Heart of Darkness was first published as a magazine serial."
— Robert McCrum, Guardian
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"We are all witnessing the sudden dematerialization of our arts and entertainment, their transfer from unique artifact source to universally on-demand screen availability. Walk down Main Street. The video and DVD emporia are gone — it happened in a year or two. The bookstores, if not yet folded, are quickly going the way of record stores. More and more people are persuaded to access their culture through screen portals, ordering up what they need for their Kindle, their iPod, their nightly watching pleasures. And the middle men, the algorithmically nimble purveyors of books and music and film, increasingly access them — us — identifying what they think we want and laying it on our electronic doorstep."
— Sven Birkerts, Los Angeles Review of Books
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"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." — Chinese Proverb

Papyrus fragment from the Book of the Dead; spell number 18 written for Nes-pauti-taui. Thebes, Upper Egypt: c. 1000 B.C.n

— from the Dallas Public Library

"Advances are quickly going to zero. Margins are going to zero for publishers. There’s no financial benefit for going with a publisher if advances are going to zero and royalties are a few percentage points. The publishing industry does minimal editing. The time between book acceptance and release is too long (often a year or more). That’s insane and makes zero sense in a print-on-demand world when kindle versions are outselling print versions."
— James Altucher

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