No, I only want to read your books! “When it comes to books, we Americans have author loyalty (I can’t wait to read the new Lorrie Moore novel), and bookstore loyalty (I will only shop at local independent bookstores, like Visible Voice or Mac’s Backs). Both forms of faithfulness offer perks, often intertwined…”

Read on…www.good.is/post/book-clubs-and-the-future-of-publishing/

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This weekend Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, contributed an op-ed for The New York Times about the company’s book-scanning project. In “A Library to Last Forever,” he writes:

Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.

Last May, Brewster Kahle, chairman of the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit digital library, wrote “A Book Grab by Google” for The Washington Post attacking Google’s proposed legal settlement in obtaining the right to digitize books. A key paragraph from Kahle reads:

We’ve wrestled with high-tech monopolies in the past — IBM, AT&T, Microsoft. The lesson was that such strongholds restrict innovation and competition. In those cases, the courts stepped in to address the inequities. Now, we have a proposal for monopolies to be created by the courts.

Cosimo publisher Alexander Dake echoes Kahle:

People should consider whether they want a future where genes in our food are owned by a private company, financial services only provided by one or two mega-banks, their political choices limited to one party, and the world’s historic archives controlled by one, albeit positively intended, search engine; or rather have multi-party democracies, a truly free market where many smaller companies provide a wide variety of services and products, and public goods not monopolized by giant corporations? That is the question, and the answer seems pretty obvious.

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UPDATE June 4: We’ve just come across an astonishing essay by Benjamin Hoff — author of The Tao of Pooh — in which he decries “publishers who seemed dedicated to opposing at every step the new ideas and forms of writing I was trying to bring to the literary world.” His conclusion is as disheartening as it is extraordinary:

The variety is constantly diminishing as corporate committees of book-ignorant, conservative-minded decision makers reject ideas and rework manuscripts they consider too new and untried, not in harmony with a particular point of view or political ideology, or lacking the potential to quickly and sensationally bring them large amounts of risk-free money. Literary quality and intelligence are being lost as well in the relentless corporate dumbing down of literature and numbing down of readers. And authors.

How many wise, inspiring, entertaining, or even basically well-written books can possibly be produced by an industry that treats authors like dirt on the corporate floor? Literary creativity and professional integrity cannot survive in such a deadly atmosphere.

Please read the entire essay — “Farewell to Authorship: And Why We’re Losing Literature” — for one author’s story about how corporate publishing has failed us. And Hoff is a highly successful, bestselling author who has made his publishers lots of money. Imagine how much worse the situation must be for writers without his track record.

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Google is preparing to sell ebooks, cutting Amazon and its Kindle out of the loop.Celebrity nonreaders proudly publish “books”… at corporate publishers who are proud to sell them.

In 2008, for the first time ever, the number of print-on-demand titles published in the U.S. has exceeded the number of traditional books produced…

…which makes the self-publishing powerhouse AuthorSolutions — which encompasses such companies as AuthorHouse and iUniverse — the biggest publisher of books today.

A thoughtful, provocative piece in The Nation considers the state of the book and the publishing industry in light of the current cultural and economic situation. A few choice excerpts:

Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we’ve been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren’t necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.

A key element in the dissemination of books, independent of publishers and booksellers but essential to both, is the press. The simultaneous collapse of the business model for newspapers and magazines is a gruesome fact of life, and we book people keenly feel the pain of a sister print-on-paper industry, to put it mildly. All citizens should be alarmed by the loss of such a vital necessity to a democracy. But the hard numbers and socioeconomic exigencies of journalism’s huge crisis differ greatly from those of book publishing’s smaller one (though they are often conflated). Here I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.

As the megapublishers tightened their grip in the 1980s, I was dismayed to see a number of once good firms of markedly different publishing style or literary taste make foolish, overpriced mistakes; they seemed to be losing their bearings as they paid ever more money for ever more questionable properties, entrusting the sewing up of these sow’s ears to not very experienced practitioners. I asked Jeremiah Kaplan, founder of the Free Press, a once autonomous and brilliant publisher of serious social science, how things could go so wrong. Besides the obvious motive of greed, he thought it simple. “Businessmen never learn from their mistakes because they always find someone else to blame for them,” he said. “Businessmen only learn from their successes. Except publishers can’t do that.” He smiled. We both knew well that you couldn’t foreordain a bestseller, no matter how wisely you handled every detail. And the necessary skills were disappearing. “Since our successes can’t be replicated, publishers learn nothing! Nothing!” Roger Straus, too, a skillful practitioner if ever there was one, understood the chanciness: “Aw, a blind pig can find a truffle,” he’d say, deflecting praise for publishing a good book well. Yes, a lot of it was blind luck.

The stifling excess of lucrative junk is, naturally, galling for literary artists unknown or only slightly known to the mass market, whose talents are perhaps not suited to it; they want or need the filthy lucre too. Their ever more powerful agents have successfully decoupled the size of the royalty advances they receive from any estimate of the books’ eventual earnings, and routinely assure them that if Knopf or Norton or Morrow fails to earn back the upfront money, it’s because their masterpieces were badly published, not because the advances were implausibly high. This is cheering, of course; writers’ egos are always shaky, and they tend to forget the sage warning that you should disregard compliments extended by someone whose income derives from your own. Also, they won’t acknowledge that literary quality may decline as advances increase; only rarely is a writer liberated into confidence-inspiring freedom by following advice from greedy publishers about Pleasing the Crowd. Willa Cather wasn’t the only fine writer who refused advances for being, in her view, unethical, nor was D.H. Lawrence the only one who found them demeaning. The agents have much to answer for.

There’s much, much more, and it’s all worth a read. The gist of it, though, is that the woes of traditional publishing have been long in the making, and are yet another symptom of the same disease that ails our global economy on the whole: thoughtless arrogance, greed, shortsightedness, and a valuing of quantity over quality.

Dystopic futures aside — does anyone with a brain really doubt that the nightmare of Idiocracy something truly in the realm of fantasy only? — what can literary people, readers and authors and publishers alike, hope for? AuthorSolutions may be the largest publisher by quantity today, but it does not vet its books at all: it exists merely as a conduit for anyone who wants to write a book, regardless of quality or even coherence, to get that book out there. Flexibility and freedom is a good thing, but won’t be merely drown in even more junk than is already throttling us?

Are we going to have to redefine the book to encompass much more than “a finite number of pages bound into a relative portable package”? Or will the sense of what we know as a book today cease to exist, and soon?

We at Cosimo find ourselves right in the middle of these conundrums. We publish print-on-demand books and sell them online, and we love the freedom and the flexibility that gives us to introduce readers to books that have been overlooked by traditional publishers, because they don’t fit into the very narrow, corporate-minded paradigms those publishers have constricted themselves into over recent decades. But Cosimo isn’t an AuthorSolutions-style vanity press, either: we don’t publish everything that crosses our desks.

But if Cosimo isn’t actually alone in this new category of publisher, we’re in a very tiny minority in trying to cope with the new reality of publishing by finding a middle ground between the two wild extremes we’re seeing today.

What is the future of books and bookstores? Or readers and reading? If you’re an author, what do you expect from publishers and the publishing process these days? And where is nontraditional publishing and bookselling going to take us, as readers and as a culture?

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And people wonder why traditional publishing is floundering?

From Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rapper Kanye West does not read books or respect them but nevertheless he has written one that he would like you to buy and read.

The Grammy Award winner, known for his No. 1 albums and outspoken statements on everything from racism in America to the banality of Twitter, is the co-author of “Thank You And You’re Welcome.”

His book is 52 pages — some blank, others with just a few words — and offers his optimistic philosophy on life. One two-page section reads, “Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!” Another page reads “I hate the word hate!”

That 52-page collection of fortune cookies will set you back 10 bucks. The book is deliberately not wordy or anything, because that’s the author’s philosophy on books:

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed,” West said. “I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.

“I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,” he said.

*sigh*

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The article — headlined “More authors turn to Web and print-on-demand publishing” — reads like something that might have been written a few years ago, but when the mainstream corporate press finally catches on to something that’s been going on for ages, that’s a sort of stamp of approval.

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I always find more stories that I want to blog about than I have time to cover in depth, but they’re still worth pointing out:

• Spotted on Boing Boing: “Why the Real Estate Boom Won’t Bust and other funny books still for sale on Amazon” (it’d be funny if the state of the economy weren’t so scary)

• At Publishers Weekly: “The Kindle for iPhone: Good App with Flaws” (early review of the new iPhone app)

• “Innovation and the Future of e-Books” (download a PDF with three examples of innovative e-books that illustrate the potential and pitfalls of electronic publications)

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In what might be considered a long overdue move, The New York Times has created a new list of bestselling books: graphic novels.

Of course, this is probably a defensive movie on the Times’ part, just as it was when the Harry Potter books threatened to dominate the Times’ fiction bestseller lists, and so the Times created a new, separate list for children’s literature.

See, the Watchmen graphic novel — which collects 12 issues of the limited-series comic book in one volume — is currently the No. 1 ranked book on Amazon. Which means it probably would have shown up in the Times regular bestseller list.

But the Times explains its creation of the graphic-novel list this way:

Comics have finally joined the mainstream.

Except comics have been the mainstream for quite a while — at least since the original publication of the collected Watchmen almost 20 years ago — and if the Times thought it was time to finally acknowledge that, it would have let Watchmen sit on its main list of book bestsellers.

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It seems that with literally each passing day these days, the news of the decline of corporate publishing mirrors more and more the decline of corporate music: just as music and bands continue to flourish even as the big music publishers continue to complain about the Internet, reading and books and authors continue to flourish even as corporate book publishers appear to be orchestrating their own downfall by misunderstanding the sea changes the Net, print-on-demand, and e-books are bringing.

A piece at The Big Money by Marion Maneker, though, gets it:

The Kindle Revolution

Digital readers will save writers and publishing, even if they destroy the book business.

The Kindle may be little more than a novelty device today. With each passing day, though, it begins to have the potential to change the business model for writers of all types and stripes.

That’s how it begins. And it’s chock full of more revolutionary goodness:

Forget all the myths about the book business: the parties, the poring over manuscripts, and passionate arguments. The book business is a distribution business, pure and simple. It’s about getting the words and ideas of a writer into the hands of a reader.

…

Theoretically, the Kindle will give writers greater access to the public. Some of contemporary publishing’s biggest success stories are self-propelled sensations. The Secret and the Twilight series were self-published works that became independent industries. A publishing house played no role in their initial success.

This is only the beginning…

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Publishers Weekly announced today that F+W Media has launched a test program to draw readers by giving away e-books:

Last week marked the soft launch for F+W’s month-long test to increase subscribers to its e-newsletters for its Writing, Woodworking and Genealogy communities by offering free e-books. The free downloads include Bob Mayer’s 70 Solutions to Common Writing Mistakes, Tom Begnal’s Popular Woodworking Pocket Shop Reference and a compilation of Maureen A. Taylor’s Photo Detective columns from Family Tree magazine.

Much more exciting: users of the iPhone and the iPod Touch (which is basically an iPhone without the phone) will now be able to read everything available to Kindle users (as reported by The New York Times):

Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple’s App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best sellers.

The publishing revolution continues…

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You wouldn’t think this would constitute much of an innovation, but the fact that it is is an excellent example of how backward the corporate publishing industry is:

Thomas Nelson announced today the launch of NelsonFree, a program that allows readers to receive content in multiple formats—physical book, audiobook and e-book—without making multiple purchases. With NelsonFree, the price of the hardcover book includes both the audio download and the e-book.

…

Once readers purchase a book with the NelsonFree logo, they are directed to a Web site where they register and answer a security question. They then can download an audio MP3 file and several types of e-book files, including EPub, MobiPocket and PDF.

…

Nelson president and CEO Michael S. Hyatt said, “I believe that the industry is shifting and we, as publishers, need to explore new methods of getting our content into the hands of customers”…

Now we’ll wait and see which major publishers follow Nelson’s lead. I’m not holding my breath…

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