From music to movies and now books, the new world of electronic distribution — authorized or not — of creative product continues to challenge both creators, who understandably want to retain as many of their rights as they can, and consumers, who understandably want to enjoy the products they’ve purchased as fully as possible.

Amazon’s just released Kindle 2 is the latest battleground. The Authors Guild has been objecting to the device’s text-to-speech capability, claiming that it infringes on their audiobook rights.

It’s a bit of a mystery why the Guild waited until the device was released to raise their objection, since the features of the Kindle 2 had been widely publicized long before the device was available. But that was its game, and it has paid off: Amazon has backed down.

As The New York Times reported over the weekend, “Amazon Backs Off Text-to-Speech Feature in Kindle”:

Amazon announced today that it will let publishers decide whether they want the new Kindle e-book device to read their books aloud.

The Times also noted that Amazon, even as it gave in to the Guild, remained adamant on the legality of the Kinde’s text-to-speech:

Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.

Kindle owners — particularly those who snatched up a Kindle 2 specifically for its text-to-speech capability — are pisssed. As one commenter at Times asked:

What difference does it make if I read it, or have the computer read it to me?

And that’s an excellent question. Clearly a computer-generated voice is no competition for a professionally produced audiobook — many of which are read by professional actors and are as much a performance as a reading. Just as clearly — as Guild president Roy Blount Jr. made clear in his published complaint about the Kindle — people reading books aloud to one another does not violate any rights of authors. Blount argues that while computer voices may not yet be particularly pleasing to the ear — I certainly would not want to listen to any entire novel read by a voice that doesn’t understand what it’s reading — they will eventually get better. But if they do, then the computer-generated voice is only more like one person to reading to another. Which Blount agrees is not something the Guild is worried about.

So what’s the problem?

Of course authors — and all creators of material that is easily distributed electronically, such as music and movies — deserve to be fairly compensated for their work. But this seems like a nonissue… and I say that as both an author myself as well as a publishing professional.

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Always cause for celebration: newly found work from the author of beloved classics:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has acquired a previously unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, written while Tolkien was a professor at Oxford during the 1920s and ’30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The house will publish The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in the U.S. and worldwide on May 5. The publication will mark the first extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigúrd the Völsung and The Fall of the Niflungs. The book will include an introduction by Tolkien, drawn from one of his lectures on Norse literature, with commentary, notes on the poems by Christopher Tolkien.

via Publishers Weekly

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The original Kindle has been sold out since November, and finally the replacement model is here. The New York Times seems to love it:

Amazon’s newest version of its popular e-book reader (see their announcement here) looks a whole lot more attractive and seems to have a simpler, more intuitive interface (the new joystick controller helps). The Kindle 2 is thinner (thinner than an iPhone, to give you some idea), has a crisper black-and-white display, turns pages much more quickly and should hold its battery charge for about 25 percent longer than the previous version. New features include text-to-speech and the ability to transfer content to other devices (such as mobile phones and other Kindles). It’s the same price as the outgoing model ($359) and will be shipped Feb. 24. Amazon is taking preorders now. The online retailer has said customers who are already on the waiting list for the old Kindle will get new Kindle 2’s.

Sounds great. And looks great, too:

So gorgeous! And what’s that they say about not such thing as being too thin…?

The new Kindle will be available February 24, but you can preorder it now.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s got a new rival for the e-book/e-reader business:

Plastic Logic, maker of an electronic book reader, plans to announce partnership deals on Monday that it says will bring a number of major publications to its planned device.

The company plans to make a device with a 10.7-inch diagonal electronic display, larger than the screens on an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader, two of the more popular models currently on the market. Plastic Logic says the device will be available early next year. It uses the same technology to display print as its main competitors.

…

Unlike the other products, the screen of the Plastic Logic Reader is big enough to more closely approximate the look of a printed newspaper or magazine page.

Ooo, that sounds nice too.

So, buy a new Kindle now, or wait for Plastic Logic’s e-reader? Can’t a girl have both?

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From The New York Times:

In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper.

The last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. The Post said in a statement Wednesday that in the printed newspaper Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the commentary section, and Style & Arts. Book World will occasionally appear as a stand-alone print section oriented around special themes like summer reading or children’s books.

I can’t say that I lament this loss as much as some other book lovers do. Newspaper book review sections, no matter how highbrow and prestigious they are or were, simply cannot cover the breadth and scope of the book world today. It was always great to get a review in one of them, but so many worthy books were left out. The smart and active book community online is only just starting to make up for that, but clearly online is the future.

And that’s just fine.

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The New York Times sounds cheery about this news:

Fiction Reading Increases for Adults

But I have my doubts.

The scoop, the Times tells us, is this:

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

What’s changed?

The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

This does not cheer me, as a writer, reader, and publishing professional. People who read one book in a year are not readers. I don’t know what to call them — occasional book consumers, perhaps — but they’re not readers.

Readers are people who can’t not read. Readers read one book a week, sometimes one book a day — not every day, of course, but a reader has had the experience of devouring an entire book in a day because he or she simply couldn’t put the book down.

A truly significant survey of American reading habits would ask how many books (or short stories, or plays, or poems) one reads in a year. It would ask about library use, book purchases, and whether one trades and borrows books with other voracious readers in order to read even more. It would ask whether one has haunted a bookstore looking for a particular book, whether one has ever preordered the next book in a series in order to have to wait not one moment longer than necessary to read more in an ongoing story. It would ask whether one has ever sold or given away books in order to make room for more books.

Those people are readers. Putting readers on the same par with people who read one poem in a year is beyond misleading — it’s a disservice to those of us for whom books are a passion and an obsession.

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Returns can be such a problem for small publishers that one press has finally done what lots of them have probably dreamt of doing for years. According to Publishers Weekly:

Lots of small publishers complain about the financial problems caused by returns, but few, if any, have done what Jasmine-Jade Enterprises, parent company of Ellora’s Cave and Cerridwen Press, just did–sue Borders and Baker & Taylor over the matter. In separate civil suits filed in Summit County, Ohio the company is charging the two parties with breach of contract and fraud. The lawsuit is seeking at least $1 million in damages.

…

The complaint alleges that Borders and B&T “knowingly ordered excessive quantities of [Jasmine] titles in order to return the excess to [Jasmine], thereby generating a credit on Defendant’s account.” The number of returns were in the tens of thousands during the time in question, the complaint states. As a result of Borders and B&T’s action, Jasmine “incurred unnecessary business expenses such as shipping costs, as well as lost business opportunities, damage to its credit rating, loss of good will with vendors and authors and other consequential and incidental damages,” the complaint says.

It’s often perceived as a “problem” that print-on-demand books aren’t carried by most brick-and-mortar bookstores. But when we see the many genuine problems associated with the way the corporate publishing and bookselling industry has structured the industry — for the benefit of those corporations, of course, not for the benefit of readers or authors — it doesn’t look like such a big issue at all. The demands that big booksellers put on small presses have the result of keeping many worthy books off the radar of many readers, so that even many books published the “traditional” way — which is supposed to be superior to print-on-demand — never get into the hands of readers anyway.

All those physical books getting shipped back and forth, sitting in warehouses and storerooms, and never being read. This is superior how?

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Just stumbled across a new blog that collects headlines from around the Web in an attempt to record the ongoing slow death of the bloated corporate whales that are broadcast television, hoary print newspapers, mega record labels, and blockbuster book publishers.

Traditional Publishing, Rest in Peace explains itself as “an ephemeral chronicle of traditional media’s decline.”

Traditional publishing — with its emphasis on superstars, its waste of resources, and its bland, homogenized, lowest-common-denominator product — is dead! Long live the innovative, nimble, frugal, egalitarian, narrowcasting, original, creative new publishing!

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She hasn’t written it yet, but Scribner is paying her millions of dollars anyway, according to the Associated Press:

“As a rare witness to the private moments of one of our country’s most consequential presidencies, and as a first lady who has maintained a notable level of discretion, her memoir will provide a candid and personal perspective, and an enduring record, of the years that have already determined the court of the 21st century,” said Susan Maldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner.

Well, it could provide a candid and personal perspective on the last eight years, but whether it will is another question entirely. The New Yorker quotes representatives from a few other big New York publishing houses who were less than impressed with what Bush wanted to sell them:

The reception to Mrs. Bush’s pitch has been mixed so far. “She was not forthcoming about anything that I would consider controversial,” the publisher who met with her said. “We questioned her rigorously, but it was one-word answers. I considered it the worst, or the most frustrating, meeting of its sort that I’ve ever had.”…

“I chose not to meet with her,” a publisher at another company said. “I got the impression that everyone was totally underwhelmed by her. That’s why there’s so little buzz.”

Ouch.

Sort of in a roundabout way, mirror-image way, the prospect of Bush’s memoirs make me think of the 1883 classic Daughters of America or Women of the Century, a collection of mini bios of the lives and work of hundreds of extraordinary women. Some of the featured women are presidential wives, but others are philanthropists, educators, and activists. In fact, author Phebe A. Hanaford, a Quaker and abolitionist, broke new ground for women in American public life.

In her Dedication, Hanaford writes:

To the women of future centuries of the United States of America, this record of many women of the first and second centuries, whose lives were full of usefulness, and therefore worthy of renown and imitation.

It makes me wonder how truly intriguing Bush’s tale of her life in the White House can possibly be. Either she had no influence over her husband in any way that could have tempered some of the “consequences” of his presidency that we’ll be contending with for a long time, or else she didn’t want to temper them. Alas, I’m not sure that this First Lady is worthy of either renown or imitation.

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Heh. Looks like I’m not the only one railing against the corporate publishers and wondering how much more clueless they can get when it comes to meeting the needs of readers in the 21st century. Kassia Krozser at Booksquare looks at one infuriating instance of out-of-touch-ness (concerning ridiculous e-book prices) and then rants:

Let’s go through this one more time: ebooks are a new, different market. You, dear publishers, have been given that rarest of gifts: a new revenue stream (think: home video for the motion picture business). These books are not competition. While there are more than a few readers who would love the luxury of choice of format/style/device when it comes to purchasing and reading books (you’re reading one), the ebook customer is different than the print book customer. Even if your ebook sales are growing by leaps and bounds each quarter, they’re nowhere near the volume that print achieves.

You’re dealing with a different animal, and — wahoo! — you now have the opportunity to change how you do business. Let’s start with smarter pricing. No, let’s start with the idea that you, publishers, are not the only game in town. You don’t “own” these books, your authors do. Your job is to prove that you can distribute these books better and more profitably for those authors. While, certainly, selling Brisingr at $27.99 is potentially a lot of money for both you and the author, how many copies can you realistically expect to sell?

It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

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Oh, the poor babies!

The New York Times — as ever, demonstrating its cluelessness when it comes to understanding how most people live, even in New York City — is lamenting the “new austerity” that has apparently come to the corporate publishing industry in these tough economic times:

For decades the New York publishing world promised a romantic life of fancy lunches, sparkling parties, sophisticated banter and trips to spots like the Caribbean to pitch books to sales representatives. If the salaries were not exactly Wall Street caliber, well, they came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.

But that cushy schmooze fest seems to be winding down.

I’ve worked in New York publishing since I was 19 years old — and that’s 20 years ago — and I have never, ever encountered anything that bears any resemblance to that scenario. And I’ve worked for some of the biggest corporations the industry knows, including Condé Nast, Time Warner, and yes, even the Times’ publishing empire. I’m not suggesting that some way-upper echelon of employees don’t expect fancy lunches and trips to the Caribbean — I’m sure they do — but they have about as much in common with the typical publishing slave as GM’s CEO has with the guy who works on the assembly line.

Earlier today I likened the woes of corporate publishing to the woes of Detroit automakers, and that really is seeming more and more apt.

At least the Times is not completely ignoring how idiotically out of whack corporate publishing has become:

“This business was never meant to sustain limousines,” said Amanda Urban, a literary agent who represents Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, among other authors. Ms. Urban said she believed Bennett Cerf, a founder of Random House, once said something to that very effect. “At best, you can get a Town Car now and then,” she said. “It’s gotten out of scale, like a lot of businesses in this country.”

Trips to the Caribbean and expensive lunches are not about books, not about words, not about authors, not about readers. They’re about a particular, extremely narrow slice of the publishing industry that focuses on blockbusters — even if they’re complete nonsense, like the slew of “memoirs” that have recently turned out to be entirely invented, but never mind: they were worth multimillion-dollar advances anyway.

The Times can’t get enough of complaining that these bloated producers of processed book product are in trouble (as they should be), even when they’re wrong about it:

For authors it means the prospect of smaller advances and fewer books being acquired.

Well, it may mean smaller advances — except for celebrities, who are still being courted and coddled with impossible huge advances — and fewer books being acquired by these corporate publishers, but they’re clearly engaged in an ongoing campaign to prove themselves irrelevant. So why should authors care? There are plenty of small publishers — the ones who never sent editors to the Caribbean or gave them open-ending expense accounts for fancy lunches — still around to actually publish their books in a way consistent with getting them into the hands of readers, and not consistent with showing overpaid editors the high life.

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