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News and Commentary about Books and Writers

News in Publishing for 2010-08-23

Who Needs a Publisher Anyway?

KonrathA recent Newsweek article pointed out that John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Fire) is now publishing books with Lulu. He published his latest collection of short stories, Briefs, with Lulu earlier this year. So why would an established author like Wideman use a print-on-demand publisher? The answer is easy. With Lulu authors get to keep 70 to 80 percent of their profits, which puts mainstream publishers to shame.

“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?”

Chinese censors take notice of Twitter-style blogs

An Internet cafe in Beijing. Chinese microblogs are exploding in popularity

An Internet cafe in Beijing. Chinese microblogs are exploding in popularity

According to an LA Times article, Chinese censors, always afraid that foreign sites are going to foment public unrest, blocked access to Facebook and Twitter. Now they’re at it again, taking aim at microblogs, which have become quite the rage in China. And their popularity is easy to explain: something was needed to fill the gap left by the paranoid Chinese government.

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:

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.

Meanwhile, the government is bent on tightening its grip. In the last year alone, authorities have taken aim at pornography and violent computer games. They mandated that computer manufacturers install filtering software on all new personal computers sold in China (though they later retreated when the much-criticized program proved ineffective). Then Google Inc. shut most of its China-based operations, citing increasing government censorship and cyber assaults from hackers suspected of targeting the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

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.”

Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose

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.

Kindle 3 pre-orders tomorrow

Kindle 3

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:

Mr. Bezos takes pains to distinguish the Kindle from the iPad, saying the company is committed to making a single-purpose piece of consumer electronics. Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare.<.p>

“For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets,” he said.

Underscoring that, Mr. Bezos said he wasn’t interested in making an Amazon tablet computer. “There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets,” he said. “Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution.”

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 settles over fake reviews

Orlando Figes

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,

As part of the settlement agreed on Friday, Prof Figes has circulated an apology and retraction in which he accepts that his denial of responsibility for the reviews was false.

He also withdrew any adverse imputations that an email he sent had conveyed against Dr Polonsky and Prof Service, and apologised for instructing his previous solicitor to write to Prof Service threatening libel proceedings for suggesting that he had written the reviews. Prof Figes and his wife also agreed to pay Dr Polonsky and Prof Service damages, and their legal costs, partly on the indemnity basis – the highest rate.

He also gave an undertaking not to repeat the allegations, not to post pseudonymous reviews of their works, and not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage them in their professional capacity.

Prof Figes admitted in a statement on April 23 that he had written the bad reviews. Dr Polonsky’s book, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, was described as “dense” and “pretentious”, with the reviewer adding that it was “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”. Prof Service’s book, Comrades, was panned as being “awful”.

In his April statement Prof Figes apologised for the distress he caused Dr Polonsky and Prof Service, and to his lawyer for having given him incorrect information.

Covering Stieg Larsson

Early design with original title

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:

Mr. Mendelsund, age 42, graduated from Columbia University in 1990 with a degree in philosophy and worked as a professional musician for more than a decade before embarking on a design career. With no formal graphic design experience, he began drafting CD album covers for an indie label. Less than six months later, a family friend introduced him to Chip Kidd, Knopf’s associate art director. Mr. Mendelsund showed Mr. Kidd his portfolio; he had a full-time job at Vintage Books, a Random House label, within the week. Eight months later he was at Knopf, his home for the last eight years.

The chosen cover

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:

Not everyone loved the jacket. Mr. Mehta said there was “some pushback” from retailers, as well as members of the publishing house’s sales team, who were looking for a more conventional depiction in lines with other thrillers—something darker, bloodier, “more Scandinavian.”

Yet Mr. Mehta stood by Mr. Mendelsund’s distinctive design. Mr. Mehta said 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.”

Los Angeles Times has new book editor

 Jon Thurber

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.”

Cigarette man set to control Borders

Bennett LeBow

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.”