Byting the Hand

From: Breathing Books

This article by an antiquarian book dealer (he is also an author; go to Amazon—one of his favourite bookstores, no doubt—to learn more about his works) is strangely silent about where all these books come from.

     Like Walmart shoppers and agribusinesses that use bee colony-destroying pesticides, he seems oblivious to the unintended consequences of his actions.

"'No Kindle? What was I going to do?'
     The answer, of course, was pathetically obvious. I went to the airport shop, bought a Kate Atkinson thriller which would see me through to New York, where I could surely replenish my reading stocks. But my unease didn't abate entirely, and though I spent six hours in the excellent company of Ms Atkinson, I never got comfortable with her. It has been a few years since I read an actual book on a plane, and I was astonished at how cumbersome, how intractably wrong, it felt in my hands. I found myself – which I have never done before and heartily disapprove of – folding the book in half so that only the page I was reading was visible. That gave me a cramp in my right hand, and the pages wouldn't stay still, quite, as I read. I found myself swaying slightly, as if at the Wailing Wall. Then I went back to the two-handed double-page-opened position – even describing it makes it seem like an obscure sort of manoeuvre, rather than a natural function – but I still couldn't settle down. The book was too fat. It was too heavy. It spread out too widely. It was as if I had taken an unruly small pet onto the plane and couldn't keep it under control."
— Rick Gekoski, The Guardian
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"How much better for the publisher and how much worse for the author? Here are examples of author’s royalties compared to publisher’s gross profit (income per copy minus expenses per copy), calculated using industry-standard contract terms:

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $2.28 e-book. Author’s E-Loss = -39% Publisher’s Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $6.32 e-book. Publisher’s E-Gain = +33%

Hell’s Corner, by David Baldacci
Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $2.63 e-book. Author’s E-Loss = -37% Publisher’s Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $7.37 e-book. Publisher’s E-Gain = +27%

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $3.38 e-book. Author’s E-Loss = -17% Publisher’s Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $9.62 e-book. Publisher’s E-Gain = +77%

     So, everything else being equal, publishers will naturally have a strong bias toward e-book sales. It certainly does wonders for cash flow: not only does the publisher net more, but the reduced royalty means that every time an e-book purchase displaces a hardcover purchase, the odds that the author’s advance will earn out — and the publisher will have to cut a check for royalties — diminishes. In more ways than one, the author’s e-loss is the publisher’s e-gain."
— Andy Ross, Andy Ross Agency
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Write-By-Numbers

From: Above & Beyond

"In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them. For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
     The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. [...]
     Pinpointing the moment when readers get bored could also help publishers create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features [Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books] says. Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series. [...]
     Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. 'The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn't have anything to do with,' says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 'We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it.'"
—Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal
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Don't buy a ticket to the Elora Writers' Festival 2012; spend the money here.

See earlier article here...

Read more about Worldreader here...

Be. Quiet.

From: One Good Eye Antiques

"In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading — Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating — but then, a few years ago, he 'became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read.' [...]
The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web [...]
And here's the function that the book — the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once — does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: 'Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.'"
— Johann Hari, Huffington Post
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Whither Books?

Photo: Arquitetura Pessoal

"They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books." — Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine)
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"But a new regime of digital technology has now disrupted all business models based on mass-produced copies, including individual livelihoods of artists. The contours of the electronic economy are still emerging, but while they do, the wealth derived from the old business model is being spent to try to protect that old model, through legislation and enforcement. Laws based on the mass-produced copy artifact are being taken to the extreme, while desperate measures to outlaw new technologies in the marketplace 'for our protection' are introduced in misguided righteousness. [...] As copies have been dethroned, the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work." — Kevin Kelly (New York Times Magazine)
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