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News and Commentary about Books and Writers
“It’s an even playing field for the first time,” says thriller writer J. A. Konrath. “The gatekeepers have become who they should have been in the first place: the readers.” He plans to publish all his future books as self-published Kindle books. Konrath realized he could cut out the middleman and make as much money on a $2.99 e-book as on a $25 hardcover. The low price of his e-books, plus user-generated ratings and reviews on blogs and chat rooms have resulted in strong sales on Amazon. “I started to be able to pay my mortgage on e-book money, then pay my bills on e-book money,” Konrath says. “I’m going to make over $100,000 this year, and a lot of the money is from the books that New York publishers rejected.” “Three dollars is a cup of coffee,” Konrath says. “Wouldn’t you rather have eight hours of entertainment from a book?”  An Internet cafe in Beijing. Chinese microblogs are exploding in popularity Microblogs, known as weibo accounts in Chinese, are personal sites that function a lot like Twitter by allowing users to post messages and links in fast, staccato blasts. Microblogs are offered by China’s leading Web portals and naturally have quickly risen in popularity, the number of weibo users having more than tripled to 100 million. China’s techie crowd and web-savvy young people have embraced the new technology, and even celebrities have discovered how to use them as promotional tools. And, yes, even the government has found them an efficient way to disseminate propoganda. Like most microblogging, weibo chatter is trite and topical, but some intellectuals and activists use them to discuss topics the Chinese government considers sensitive, like human rights and basic human dignity. But hopes of wider freedom of communication were spoiled this month when unexpectedly the authorities shut down some of the sites. Naturally Internet support personnel had their worries. Big Brother, clearly, was enforcing the shutdowns to impose tighter control and oversight, primarilly to clamp down on communication deemed challenging to state authority. According to the LA Times article:
Regulation, however, could prove very difficult, mainly because because of the growing number of users. “It’s very difficult to control these [microblogging] sites,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of the Beijing-based Danwei.org. “No matter how great the Great Firewall is, all it takes is one guy to post the complete works of Master Li of the Falun Gong.” Well-known political blogger Michael Anti, said he’s definitly feeling the heat. He now accesses Twitter through a foreign server to avoid Chinese authorities. “Microblogs are going to be more and more nonpolitical,” Anti said. “It’s just going to be entertainment.” I didn’t stay up last night to see Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose. But for those who missed it, I’ve posted the interview in its entirety. Yes, I believe this to be an historic interview. Some of Bezos’ pithy comments concern the number of people who play video games on their iPad while Kindle owners read books on their devices. I especially love his comment about the Kindle being cheaper than some sunglasses. 
The new Kindle e-reader will come in two iterations: one with Wi-Fi and 3G Internet connections and another with Wi-Fi only. First we had the markdowns on the Kindle 2, which should have been an early clue because pretty much the same thing happened to the Kindle 1 right before the Kindle 2 was released. When the Kindle 2 went out of stock on Amazon, industry watchers and the curious alike knew that the next generation Kindle would be coming soon. (All of these events are nicely covered in a Wall Street Journall article. If you want a more in-depth look, Wired has it covered.) The new Kindle will have the same higher-contrast screen as the new Kindle DX, and will be available in 3G for $189 and wi-fi only for $139, which makes it a good $10 below the wi-fi-less Kobo or the wi-fi-only Nook. “We developed this device for serious readers. At these price points, it may be much broader than that,” said Jeff Bezos in an interview. “People will buy them for their kids. People won’t share Kindles any more.” The Journal article does a good job of placing the Kindle in relation to the e-reader market in general:
My own take on the Kindle is that Amazon has left its market position vulnerable to devices like the iPad that show full color and have become the darlings of newspaper and magazine publishers who have clearly shifted their efforts away from the Kindle and towards the iPad.  Orlando Figes Historian Orlando Figes has agreed to pay damages to two fellow historians, Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service, after Figes wrote fake negative reviews of their work posted on Amazon.com.uk. At first, Prof Figes’ wife, Stephanie Palmer, a law lecturer at Cambridge University, claimed responsibility for the reviews. But the accusations continued, specifically that Prof Figes wrote them using the pseudonyms “Historian” and “Orlando-Birkbeck.” Prof Figes, on sick leave since the scandal broke, made matters worse by threatening legal action against colleagues, literary journals, and newspapers — any persons or organizations Figes claimed might have written the reviews. Eventually it emerged that Prof Figes wrote the reviews himself. According to a Press Association report,
 Early design with original title According to a Wall Street Journal report, the bright yellow cover of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” has quickly achieved the status of one of the “iconic” book covers in contemporary publishing in the U.S. But like the thriller, its path has been full of twists and dead ends. Sonny Mehta, who as chairman and editor-in-chief of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group bought the rights to the novel in 2007 didn’t like the cover designs on the European and Asian editions—with their pictures of sexy women with dragon-shaped tattoos. He found them distasteful and described them as “somewhat redundant” and “cheesy.” This is where Peter Mendelsund comes in. Mr. Mendelsund is a senior book designer at Knopf. For Larsson’s book, he prepared nearly 50 different designs, all of which were subjected to intense scrutiny. About Mendelsund, Lauren Fador writes in the Jouranl:
 The chosen cover Starting with the book’s early working title, “The Man Who Hated Women,” which was closer to the original Swedish, Mendelsund eventually came up with the cover that today graces bookstores everywhere. Knopf chairman Mehta’s idea was to design a jacket that would help Knopf avoid what happend in the American market to the books of Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, whose U.S. presentation and book sales were disappointing. Mehta did not want Mr. Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy to face a similar fate in the U.S. ((Since its release, “Dragon Tattoo” has sold 3.8 million copies in the U.S. to date.) Mehta gave the final approval to Mendelsund’s distinctive design mostly because “he didn’t want the books to be pigeonholed: ‘I was extremely worried that they would be dismissed as crime novels, Scandinavian crime novels, in translation.’” Mehta is convinced the final jacket design has proven to be one of the keys to the success of the book. However, as the Journal points out:
 Jon Thurber The Los Angeles Times has named a new book editor to replace David Ulin, who ran the section for five years. In yet another terse press release, the paper announced unceremoniously that managing editor Jon Thurber will now be sitting at Ulin’s former desk. Thurber was named managing editor/print in July 2009 and is a 38-year veteran of the paper. Editor Russ Stanton, who wrote the release, does not provide any details of any literary writing nor any experience Thurber has had working in the book industry. Rather than explaining why Ulin got the job, Stanton spends most of the release bragging about Thurber’s obituary skills: “Jon spent 11 years as obituary editor, building our coverage into some of the best in the country. He also led by example, penning more than 400 obits during his time as editor.” Readers will surely miss Ulin’s perceptive writing. One of my personal favorites was “The Lost Art of Reading.”  Bennett LeBow According to a Publishers Weekly report, a special shareholders meeting set for September 29 should further solidify Bennett LeBow’s leadership of Borders. It’s expected that “shareholders will be asked to approve a proposal to give LeBow’s company, LeBow Gamma Limited, the right to acquire 35.1 million shares of the retailer for $2.25 per share.” LeBow became Borders’ largest shareholder last May when his firm essentially stopped Borders from going bankrupt with a $25 million investment in 11.1 million shares of the company. Bennett S. LeBow is a corporate raider and Chairman of the Board and CEO of Borders Group and Chairman of the Board of Vector Group, primarily a cigarette manufacturing company. Borders announced Wednesday (in this release) that shareholders will also vote on a second proposal that will require the approval of LeBow Gamma Limited Partnership before the company could begin “appointing, terminating or transferring the Chief Executive Officer or Chief Financial Officer of the company, or any executive officer, or materially changing the terms and conditions of their employment, subject to certain exceptions.” As Nathan Bomey observest in an report on AnnArbor.com, LeBow is “is positioning himself to gain more control of the Ann Arbor-based book store chain.” This, however, may not augur well for the company, as Bomey notes: “Borders, which is struggling to return to profitability, faces a tenuous long-term future as an independent retailer.” |
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The government goes to great lengths to sanitize the Internet in China. It forces websites to delete objectionable material and pays Internet users to sway opinion on forums. It also maintains a vast censorship apparatus, nicknamed the Great Firewall, to filter information flowing in from abroad. Some savvy Chinese netizens have learned to jump that barrier using technology that links their Chinese computers to servers located outside the country, beyond the reach of state minders. Still, these proficients remain the minority among China’s estimated 420 million Internet users.
citing increasing government censorship and cyber assaults from hackers suspected of targeting the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.