London Book Fair Opens Under the Volcano

The London Book Fair gets underway at Earl’s Court today. This is an event I enjoy attending annually to gauge the state of publishing which has been suffering from the twin-pronged approach of economic and technological challenges.

This year the Fair faces another problem: the ash falling over Europe from the Icelandic volcano that has cleared the skies of aircraft. Many people will be unable to attend the Fair due to the air-travel blackout, while others on mainland Europe are changing their air-travel arrangements to ferry, road and Eurostar Rail methods. The result might be a shortage of attendees from the United States and other overseas territories.

As the madness of the Fair arrives in London this week, The Observer’s Robert McCrum spends a day with legendary agent Andrew Wylie in New York:

Today he comes to greet me in the tranquil, overheated hallway of his 12th-floor office as the day closes and the evening light merges into the fluorescent glare of uptown off-Broadway. In person, Wylie is slight, courteous and soft-spoken -- as if with his dark suit and formal good manners he can live down his reputation as competitive, self-willed, transgressive and ruthless.

The contrast between his polite self-presentation and his erstwhile reputation as a hell-raiser and “a lizard” makes for an edgy formality. But it doesn’t take long for his sardonic bad-boy self to break through the mask. Wylie's minimalist office displays several promotional copies of the Nabokov backlist in various foreign editions. When I comment on the number of literary estates (Borges, Mishima, Waugh, Lampedusa and Updike, to name some of the most prominent) controlled by the Wylie Agency, he says, with a mirthless laugh: "People are dying like flies." It's at moments like this that you can see why, in the Anglo-American book world, he is known, simply as "the Jackal".

Once a more than slightly feral predator, however, Wylie has now become something far more menacing in the literary undergrowth. In a business environment where many of the principal publishers, booksellers and rival literary agents are reeling from the remorseless depredations of recession and digitisation (the IT revolution), he can make a good claim to be the most powerfully composed and uniquely global writers' representative on either side of the Atlantic, a king of the book publishing jungle.

McCrum’s piece is lengthy, interesting and here.

Where Do Bookstores Fit in an Electronic World?

Lately, it seems that barely a day can go by without some sort of electronic book news making headlines. Part of me is happy about this: where there’s discussions about books, you generally don’t have to look very far to find people reading, and that’s always a good thing. But in the sea of decision-making that accompanies the sudden rush to go electronic, certain aspects of the process are being overlooked. The most recent chunk of e-book news touches on this gently.

Yesterday’s e-book headline was that legal thriller meister John Grisham had announced that he’s had a change of heart about his original anti-e-book stance. Knopf Doubleday said Tuesday that they would be releasing Grisham’s backlist in e-book form. From The New York Times:

According to Random House, his books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. Mr. Grisham had previously hesitated to release his books in e-book form because of concerns about piracy, pricing and the effect of digital editions on physical bookstores.

I can’t help but think that, in his initial assessment, Grisham had it right. What does happen to physical bookstores in an electronic world? Because, let’s face it, all this e-book stuff? We’re going to get it right eventually. The electronic readers will be seamless and easy to operate, everything anyone wants to read will be available in that form and all the concerns some people currently have about privacy and piracy will either be overcome or swallowed down. What I’m saying: with electronic books, it’s no longer a question of “if.” Only a matter of “when” and “how.”

But what about bookstores? Where do they fit? And what are publishers and authors doing to make sure that the lifeblood of the publishing industry doesn’t get cut off?

And it’s do-able: sure it is. It’s not an easy piece, but it’s a possible one. It’s a huge step: re-imagining some of the very foundations that contemporary publishing are built on. International rights deals, for instance. Already on shaky ground in an electronic world, if publishers do make it possible for independent bookstores to sell electronic books, who gets to sell what and to whom?

While right now there are obstacles preventing most small booksellers from getting into the e-book market, one of the things I’ve heard whispered about are value-added deals that would allow physical bookstores to sell an electronic version of a book with a hardcover. That would make a lot of sense: if, for instance, the only place you could get an e-book version with a hardcover was your local indie, suddenly maybe it’s worth the trip. The problem is, it just isn’t as simple as it sounds especially since, at present, publishers are so concerned about how electronic books are going to impact their own bottom lines, they don't seem to be offering even lip service to their old partners, the indie booksellers.

Here’s the thing, though: somebody has to do something for the indies, and fast. If we don’t look after them now, we’ll be crying at their memory. Nobody wants that.

Google and Amazon Trying to Take Over the World? Shut-Up, Please. I Just Want to Read.

Even mainstream news agencies are carrying news about the Google book deal and the Amazon Macmillan electronic rights wars. I’ve read a lot of misinformed articles and cock-eyed assessments of both situations in the last week -- both in the world and on the Web. I’ll bet you have too.

With a few exceptions, we’ve been resisting the urge to comment on either story at January Magazine, other than with the broadest of strokes. This is because, in a very real sense, both stories are outside of our mandate.

January has always been about the celebration of books and reading. There are other -- many other -- publications and blogs whose mandates seems to be to comment on the business end of publishing. It seems to us that, in some ways, there is very little about the publishing industry that has anything to do with books other than making, distributing and selling them. Certainly the appreciation of the written word -- what makes a good book, what ignites that fire in the soul -- has very little to do with the industry of publishing. They are connected thoughts, sure. But they are not the same.

While it can be argued that, in the end without the industry, there can be no books, we would argue back that this is simply not true. These two current situations seem very dire. And to some people, I suppose they are. In the big picture, however, I assure you, they will not be.

I’ve said this before, will likely say it again: when it comes to books, I want my full body immersion. Everything else is just a lot of noise. The industry will go ahead and work out the details and, in a perfect world, everyone will be happy when they do.

When the dust settles -- and it will -- there will be books for us to read. Someone will be publishing them. They might be on paper, they might be electronic. Those involved will make a certain amount of money, or they will not. But, here’s the thing, when I sit near my hearth, or at the beach or under a tree in the summer time, and I have a book in my hand, it will make the world go away. And all of this noise? It doesn’t have a lot to do with that.

Amazon Capitulates

Well, it looks as if Amazon has blinked first in its big e-book battle against mega-publisher Macmillan. An announcement posted this evening by the “Amazon Kindle team” reads:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

No need to rub Amazon’s nose in it. Let’s just call this good news for all those Macmillan authors whose work will once more be easily available through the giant online retailer.

READ MORE: “Looking Like a Fool with Your Foot in Your Mouth,” by Sandra Ruttan (On Life and Other Inconveniences).

Will Apple’s Tablet Kill the Kindle? (And Does it Really Matter?)

E-book watchers are betting that when Apple’s much-anticipated tablet finally reaches consumers some time between now and this spring, the presently precarious e-book market will solidify. The New York Times looks at recent developments:

It’s a formidable high-tech face-off: Amazon.com versus Apple for the hearts and minds of book publishers, authors and readers.

Amazon’s Kindle devices and electronic bookstore now dominate a nascent but booming market, accounting for more than 70 percent of electronic reader sales and 80 percent of e-book purchases, according to some analysts. And on Thursday it will take a page from Apple and announce that it is opening up the Kindle to outside software developers.

Not only that, but Amazon will also debut a shiny new Kindle device. Between that and the newly opened source, Amazon insiders expect things to be shaken up, but in a happy way:

Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle at Amazon, said he expected developers would devise a wide range of programs, including utilities like calculators, stock tickers and casual video games. He also predicts publishers will begin selling a new breed of e-books, like searchable travel books and restaurant guides that can be tailored to the Kindle owner’s location; textbooks with interactive quizzes; and novels that combine text and audio.

Sound familiar? (There’s an app for that.)

All of this, just as Apple is about to unleash a device that is much more expensive than the Kindle, but also much more capable: a creature that will likely be very much like an iPod on steroids, capable of all types of computing and -- by the way -- acting as an e-book reader.

While all of this Kindle-killing speculation is fun for the media and interesting for those of us who will ultimately end up schlepping such devices, we’re still a very long way from fat ladies and singing.

Think of the epic battles between Betamax and VHS. Then think of what you’re recording video with these days.

Or how about eight-track and cassette or even -- heaven forbid -- reel-to-reel. What about eight-and-a-half inch diskettes, versus mini-floppies, then on to zip drives and rewriteable CD-ROMS and all the other storage devices we ended up spending big bucks on in the time leading up to now: I have a flash drive smaller than a lipstick that I need to keep in a special drawer in my desk for fear of it getting lost.

My point with all this memory lane stuff is this: while we work towards the answer, don’t anticipate that it’s right around the corner. It is not. But here is what I predict: in the end the medium will not matter. Nor will we care about the puny questions we bandy back and forth so seriously now. What really matters never changes, not in the long haul.

I want my full immersion reading experience. Work out the details, please. Fight quietly amongst yourselves. I need the quiet, because you see, I’m over here, in front of my fire, with my heart and my mind immersed in a book.

I’ll Be Tweeting You

Some of the January crew has been spending altogether too much time on Twitter lately. Part of this is due the fact that so much interesting has been happening. The trouble is, with everything going down on Twitter practically in real-time, sometimes it’s difficult to get up the gumption to actually write about the stuff that’s interesting. By the time you formulate a thought, the world is on to the new thing.

A case in point came yesterday when it was announced that two staples of American publishing, the periodicals Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews, would be discontinued. We saw it on Twitter first and read about it here and here and here. While people were quick to wonder what this might be saying about the publishing industry, it really does look very much as though the loss of the two respected publications were little more than collateral damage. Sad -- and pointless enough in itself, but not sufficient to start changing your career path. And even though the rise in citizen journalism is possibly not the cause of these two deaths, it’s interesting to look at that phenomena -- as has been done here -- and think about what it might mean for all of us in the long run.

While e-books and all that go with them are very much on everyone’s mind these days, I’m quite confident that the final race will not be between Amazon’s early entry, the Kindle or Barnes & Nobles’ “half-baked” nook. (Nook? Really? Who lost a contest in order for them to stick that name on it?) A lot of electronics companies are running around these days, trying to come up with Kindle killers. But Apple’s announcement that they will finally launch their Tablet computer this coming spring is likely striking fear into the hearts of all who would sell devices that help consumers read electronic books and -- in a way -- the industry. And why the fear? One word (or is it two?): iPod. ‘Nuff said.

With the end of the year and decade drawing closer, everyone is scratching out lists. While most outfits are offering up their best ofs, The Guardian scrapes out their cookie jars and shows us their worst. And while we’re on the topic, how about the top ten books of 1709?

Here’s something short and wacky: There are more Wikipedia entries about Middle Earth than about many countries in Africa. Hmmm.

Were you still thinking Oprah had mondo influence on book buyers? Forgetaboutit and check out the Tiger Effect.

The Huffington Report tells us about Eight Books That Predicted the Financial Crisis & Huff readers respond.

The third Twilight film will be six stories tall in IMAX. (Zoiks! Great, nasty teeth!)

Boing Boing offers up the most delicious tidbits. Take this one, for instance, without Boing Boing, how would we know The Nation was auctioning off a Noam Chomsky garden “Noam?”

Edit in motion: Charles Dickens’ manuscript for A Christmas Carol with author revisions. Cool.

The Twilight of the Book Industry? Maybe Not.

Right in the middle of the excitement about the opening of the latest movie based on Stephanie Meyer’s phenomenally selling Twilight series, it’s interesting to think about what all of this hoopla says about books and where we are with them now.

When the film, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, opens later today, it is expected to break ticket records. The first film, Twilight, grossed more than $190 million in North American revenues after it opened last year.

While much is said about just why Meyer’s series is so beloved, what interests me today is what this rabid outpouring is saying about the book industry.

Let’s face it: one way or another, book publishing has had a rough year. Much of it self-inflicted. Between shaky international financial news and the uncertainty many parts of the industry are forecasting through the final arrival of the electronic book, the industry has been stumbling. And through the stumbles we hear the chanting of cynical voices about the death of the book. It has always been thus, but now it’s more.

And then there is Twilight. And then there is The Lost Symbol. And then there is just about anything J.K. Rowling would care to put her name on. Others, as well. Books that create excitement and cause line-ups and watercooler chatter. And no: bestsellers do not an industry make, but they sure don’t hurt anything. For one thing, a book that is discussed, is talked about, is pressed on even friends who usually do not read gets a culture talking about books. More importantly, it spreads the very real joy of reading around. It gets people reading who might not otherwise have had a chance to be properly exposed to the full body experience of being immersed in a good story and the emotional virtual reality that reading offers.

The publishing industry, like so many others, is going through changes. Sure, things in the future are going to be different. But millions of girls and young women excitedly sharing a book that they feel simply must be read indicates a certain vibrance for that future. And not all change is bad.

National Bookstore Day Today: Let’s Shop!

Let’s face it: bookstores have had a pretty rough ride this year. Between the (cheerfully monikered) economic meltdown (cue scary music now), the rising tide of electronic books and the hardcover price wars of earlier this autumn, there must have been at least a few days in 2009 when some booksellers just didn’t even want to get out of bed.

All of this leads us to the Publishers Weekly-sponsored National Bookstore Day, the idea being that bookstores are front and center on one day: November 7th. Says PW:

Event organizers are hoping promotions tied to the day will attract local and national media coverage -- and, in turn, draw new customers into bookstores. “The number of stores already signed up meets our rosiest hopes for this first year. Many of the stores celebrating National Bookstore Day are recognized nationally as leaders, so we're gratified that this idea has been endorsed by these savvy booksellers,” said Ron Shank, PW group publisher. Among the offerings that bookstores are planning are author signings, children’s activities, discounts, extended hours, free refreshments, marathon “read-aloud” events, raffles and writing contests.

Though the idea is laudable, here at the 11th hour, National Bookstore Day doesn’t seem to have gained the traction garnered earlier this year by American thriller author Joseph Finder’s grassroots “Buy Indie Day.”

Even so, every conscious step taken moves us in the right direction. The message is one to cherish and remember: books are important. So are the people who buy, make and sell them. The place books have in our lives is of value: it’s meaningful to us. And if we take all of this as read, it behooves us to do everything in our collective power to keep independent bookstores not only strong and out there, but going. And how do we do that? We try to raise awareness. We raise readers. We spread the word.

And then we shop.

What Bloodletting in the Newsroom Means to Books

Newsgathering as we know it is having its toughest year in memory. With so many readers skidding in the blood of the newspapers they’ve loved for decades -- forever -- and newsies finding themselves increasingly wondering what the hell the next cycle might bring, even the very best and brightest of the newsgathering breed are wondering what the future will look like.

In the shadow of this bloodletting, the vultures are gathering. No matter what happens to our free presses, we need our news. And if we can’t get it in the way we’ve always gotten it, well ... some of us are prepared to take it any way we can.

You cannot expect self-interested parties -- publishers, booksellers, even authors -- to disseminate unbiased stories about themselves and those they represent. It just doesn’t work that way. And yet, as traditional media fail, that’s exactly what we are increasingly seeing. For instance, Barnes & Noble’s Review. As good as its editorial material often seems to be, does a bookseller really have any business positioning itself as as part of “the press”? Publishers are playing, too. For instance, Penguin U.S. has just launched a full suite of what it’s calling “online programming.” Last month, Kristin O’Connell, Penguin’s director of online marketing, sent out a release letting us know that most of the online “content” now available through Penguin is “created, written, shot, edited and produced by more than 30 Penguin Group (USA) executives and department team members who are closest to the content, some having worked directly with the books.”

You can tell from both O’Connell’s release and the material itself that it was created with pride, and that’s all right. But can it be created without bias? I don’t think it can. How can those “closest to the content” be expected to share an uncompromised vision with us, their potential readers or viewers? They cannot. It is, after all, not their job to do that. It is their job -- I’ll just say it straight out -- to sell us stuff. And to be good at that job -- really, really good at it -- they can never do anything but pretend at journalistic integrity. That’s just how all of this works.

There is a mad blurring going on in the media today. Born of a kind of desperate clutching for something that makes sense when held against traditional standards of doing things. In all parts of the media, people are trying to find order in chaos. And they will. Of course they will. Just maybe not right now. Right now we need to find our way. Whatever happens, though, we need our newsgatherers -- our unbiased, independent, traditional newsies. Period.

Right at this moment I’m not sure how those newsies will be getting their goods to us in five years. But I do know one thing: we must avoid the trap of taking too much of our news and information, and too many of our book reviews, from those who have the most to gain by giving all of those things to us.

BookExpo: Tony Buchsbaum’s Notes from the Floor

For the past three days, I have been on the exhibit floor at BookExpo America 2009 in New York City. Open only to people in the book trade, BEA is the place to be if you love books.

Usually, there are something like 25,000 people. Many are manning booths; many more are ducking in and out of them. The point? For publishers to show independent booksellers, the press and competing publishers what they’re cooking up for the next six months or so. There are usually mountains of advance copies, free for the grabbing. And, of course, there are authors everywhere, autographing sessions and the usual assortment of trade-show gimmes, from candy and pens to notepads, T-shirts and posters.

This year, two things altered the BEA experience. The dodgy economy resulted in far fewer books. Gone were the mountains of galleys, replaced by, well, modest hills of them. Some of the big publishers, notably Random House, didn’t offer books unless an author was there to sign them (long lines, anyone?). This meant less shoulder pain -- but it also meant much less excitement on the trade show floor.

Some years, a really big book makes its mark on the show; becomes the one everyone is talking about: The Prince of Tides, Presumed Innocent and The Horse Whisperer are good examples from the past. One big book was the other thing that changed BEA 2009 -- and the closest anyone got to it was the big banners in the entrance hall. That’s right: Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, coming from Doubleday in September. More than one publisher told me they’d moved planned books to other times of the year, to avoid being crushed by it.

What else were attendees talking about? Electronic books. The general consensus was that content was king, and how we read is beside the point. (Personally, I like the feel of paper. Plus, the batteries in a book never run out no matter how long your flight is delayed.)

In terms of author sightings, it seemed there was at least one at every booth, every moment of every day. Without looking too hard you could see James Patterson, Dr. Ruth, Diana Gabaldon, Michael Lewis, Robert Goolrick and James Ellroy, to name just six of hundreds. They were all happily signing books. Who did I stand in line for? Jeff Kinney, author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. My son was over the moon later that afternoon, when I presented him with an autographed copy.

Next year, BEA’s organizers say the trade show will change again. Traditionally held over a weekend, in 2010 it will move to mid-week. Whether the mountains of books will return is anyone’s guess. My own suspicion is that it’ll be up to the economy. And Dan Brown.

Finally, the oddest thing: Usually there’s a constant crowd of people registering. This year, every day, the crowd was reduced dramatically after the morning rush -- and by Saturday afternoon there was no one in line to get in. The people behind the counter were just sitting there with nothing to do. And I kept thinking: Why didn’t someone get them something to read?

John Sayles Looking Forward to Some Time in the Sun

Like a lot of publishing-related stories this week, the dek of a Los Angeles Times piece on John Sayles’ inability to sell his latest novel seems intended to cast gloom on an economy embittered industry.

“The writer-filmmaker is shopping a sprawling work of historical fiction,” writes John Getlin, “but no big publishers are buying. Such is the cautious state of publishing today.”

It seems to me that this is the kind of reporting that has a whole generation irritated with news gatherers. While the piece is well-written and there is input from numerous sources, it seems to have an agenda. Book Expo gets underway in New York in a few days. As a result, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a story about all the doom and gloom in publishing, though most of those stories only use the numbers that back up their claims, ignoring the ones that show that, not only are portions of the publishing industry surprisingly robust but, in certain sectors, we begin to see that reading is having something of a Renaissance.

But back to John Sayles wandering about with his magnum opus tucked under his arm:

“I’ve been done with it for six or seven months, and it’s out to five or six publishers,” he said quietly. “But we haven’t had any bites yet.”

John Sayles, Oscar-nominated creator of “Return of the Secaucus 7,” “Lone Star,” “Matewan” and other movies, is having trouble getting a book deal.

The situation is almost entirely traceable to the publishing industry's economic woes, and it’s raising eyebrows, because Sayles was an accomplished fiction writer long before he made his first film. Weighing in at a whopping 1,000 typed pages, “Some Time in the Sun” is his first novel since 1990’s “Los Gusanos.”

Later in the piece, though, we’re told that when it comes to books, Sayles’ sales have never been that great. “Sales records matter more than ever, and some publishers are reluctant to take chances on writers such as Sayles, 58, whose previous books got rave reviews but were never bestsellers.”

The book is 1000 manuscript pages -- which would put it around 250,000 words: a toe breaker by anyone’s calculations. Not to mention expensive to produce: all those page. The author is well known, but his books are esoteric. And, clearly, the reading public that gobbles up the latest Dan Brown novel doesn’t want to be bothered with a lot of stuff like thinking. And, to make matters worse, the book is historical fiction of the most meaningful kind. That means that, when published, Some Time in the Sun might be an important book, it might even be a brilliantly reviewed book, but it probably won’t be a bestseller. (Historical fiction is never a bestseller, unless it is, then everyone forgets that rule. For a while.)

Now here’s the thing: publishing is made out of Cinderella stories. Listen to the bestseller back stories and you’ll hear it: tale after tale just like this. Only concluding with a happy ending: finally a book deal followed by a film deal followed by tears at the awards ceremonies. I’m thinking that’s where this is going, ultimately. Of course someone will publish Sayles’ book. Of course it will be fantastic and so be well-reviewed. And the rest, well, we’ll have to see. The point is, I’m not as confident as Getlin and some of his sources that this book would have found a home a year or more ago and that this is a more “jittery moment” in publishing history than any of those that have gone before.

“Some Time in the Sun,” writes Getlin “...blends vivid human portraits with historical events and brilliantly captures individual voices.... it spotlights African American and white soldiers fighting in the Philippines, fast-buck artists who help create the motion picture industry, and features cameos by Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, Damon Runyon and other historical figures.”

It sounds amazing. I’m looking forward to the news still to come on this book. The small press that buys and lovingly publishes it, the throngs that read it and rave and tell their friends. I’m looking forward to seeing Cinderella ride again.

Death of the Book: Again with the Falling Sky?

Maybe the people most tightly wound into the book industry are not the most objective when it comes to pronouncing on the health of the book in our culture. That is, they can tell us how they see things now, but they have sunk too far into the “business” end to separate out the “book.”

That’s what I was thinking as I read Elizabeth Sifton’s carefully thought out article in the June 2009 edition of The Nation. Sifton, senior vice-president of Farrar, Strauss, Giroux offers up a deeply considered piece on where she feels the market is now. Unfortunately -- and like so many others -- there are just so many trees in the way: it’s difficult to see the forest. At all.

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.

But, as Sifton herself points out, the industry has been predicting the death of the book for... well, almost forever. And still the book hangs on. Why? So many reasons, really. Portability, ease of use, a classic and proven design. And anyone who wonders if the generations just now heading to reading age will care about reading or will be swept away in a sea of Tweets and Facebook status updates need only utter a short mantra: Rowling, Meyer, Gaiman. Kids are reading. Of course they’re reading. Kids love their books. Treat them right, and those same kids will be reading when they themselves have kids. And why? Because books are good. Reading rocks. And you can reinvent the wheel or build a better mousetrap but nothing will ever duplicate the direct-to-unconscious hit of reading a good book.

Sifton again:

What now? Publishers are battening down, and chain stores are struggling, having staked so much on nationally merchandised dreck, having committed themselves to imitating the look of the big indies but never quite matching their tighter local focus and skill in “hand selling” genuine books to readers. Anyway, the entire world of American retail business is veering toward obsolescence. Must books now find their way in cyberspace?

Yes, yes: point taken. The way books find consumers is changing, at least in part. The way they are published and marketed is changing. Elements of the business of books will change. But the book itself? The book will survive: of course it will.

Of course it will.

International Book Fair Offers Bright Spot During Bleak Times

The 54th International Book Fair got underway today in Warsaw, with 500 exhibitors and thousands of visitors taking part in what is said to be Europe’s second largest show of its kind.

The fair takes place at Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science until May 24th. Nearly all of Poland’s publishing houses as well as representatives from over 30 countries were on hand when the fair opened today on a wave of optimism.

“The crisis did not influence our fair,” spokesperson Roman Czejarek told Polskie Radio. “It seems that it will be a big celebration with a great deal of drive, a rich offer of accompanying events, crowds of visitors and an impressive number of book premieres.”

The Polskie Radio piece is here. China View offers a brief look here.

National Black Book Festival Will Attract Wide Audience

Dozens of authors and thousands of readers will converge on Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center on May 16 and 17 for the National Black Book Festival.

Featured authors will include Roland S. Martin (Speak Brother! A Black Man's View of America), Mary B. Morrison (Noire, Single Husbands) and Persia Walker (Harlem Redux, Darkness and the Devil Behind Me).

The National Black Book Festival is held in conjunction with the Houston Black Expo and attracts attendees from all branches of book-related fields including authors, publishers, book clubs, libraries and individual readers.

A pavilion of authors will offer book signings and discussion sessions with featured authors; workshops and seminars, a spoken word poetry slam and book club giveaways. Check the Web site for event times and ticketing information.

Giving Away the Cow: Google Book Search Settlement

Up until now, we’ve stayed out of the fray over the proposed Google Book Search Settlement. For me, this has in part been due the fact that I’ve had a gnawing sense of unease that can border on panic whenever I contemplate what they’re proposing. The sheer audacity of what Google wants to undertake with this knocked the wind out of a lot of people’s sails. Certainly, the whole time this has been going on I’ve been sort of shaking my head, not quite believing what I was seeing and hearing.

In a very simple nutshell, Google wants to scan millions -- millions mind you -- of books and store them digitally, making them available, basically at their whim. OK, that’s possibly a gross oversimplification, but you get the idea: what they’re proposing could change everything.

Why does it all come back to newspapers for me these days? But it does. And here we are again: With the futures of many papers in jeopardy, one of the things I’ve been hearing from that industry in the last month or so is that they made some bad decisions about a decade ago when newspapers decided to give away the cow and then ended up being surprised when their readers kept wanting free milk. I don’t want to be sitting here in another decade listening to publishers saying: Oh, drat. Maybe we shouldn’t have done that. But I stand here in my near panic watching while they gather the cows, preparing to set them free for 60 bucks a head. It’s enough to make your hair stand on end.

Now thunder clouds are gathering from all angles. The most recent of these comes by way of David Needle at Internet News who quotes Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle in a recent column:

Kahle said he’s especially driven to protect books because “books are how we think in long form. They’re generally written by one person ... and can put across a big idea.”

He lamented the rise of Amazon and Google as the primary distribution points of books and their content. Kahle said he thinks Google’s efforts to digitize vast amounts of public domain and other books to make them more widely available is laudable, but he criticized the proposed settlement (now under review) with book publishers because it gives the search giant the right to digitize and control the distribution of out of print books that aren’t necessarily out of copyright.

Another monopoly?

“It creates another monopoly,” said Kahle. “It doesn’t make sense for them to be locked up by Google, it’s very screwy.”

Going forward he warned the settlement might “determine the future of books and paid content.”

Meanwhile, Arts Technica is reporting that Google’s plan has libraries worried:

The deal Google cut with publishers to settle their copyright infringement suit would give a green light to the search giant's book-scanning services and turn it into a retailer of out-of-print books. But resistance to the deal has been growing, as a variety of parties are realizing that the settlement gives both Google and the Book Rights Registry created by the deal enormous power over the dissemination of the scanned material. The latest groups to weigh in represent research librarians, who are worried about the deal's privacy implications and the lack of guarantees of current and future access. The solution, in their view, is to structure the settlement in a way that guarantees the court the right to intervene in the future.

See, that’s the thing: it isn’t that Google is evil. And it might not be that Google’s plan is bad. But it will change things. And how? Well, we don’t exactly know. But when you look at, say, how the music industry has been altered by technology over the last decade and if you look at my favorite news-gathering example you can see that even something built slowly over many, many years -- even generations -- can be torn down very easily if you slide away the right -- or the wrong -- bricks. Like a lot of people, I’m not so sure that concentrating all the control in one place is such a great idea.

This controversy is far from over and -- certainly -- there’s a lot more to know than I’ve shared here where I’ve been talking a lot about cows and sails and nail-biting panic. If you want to build a more lucid picture, Library Journal has put together an impressive page of links on the topic. Some time spent here will fill in all the blanks.

I don’t know what the correct answer is to this one. Heck: some days I’m not even completely sure I’m understanding the question. But I do know this: there are some very important issues in play here. Some would even say precious or sacred. Caution at this point seems not only prudent, but also necessary. We have so very much at stake.

The Changing Face of P.O.D.

This is what micropublishers have been dreaming about for decades, really. One machine that does it all and makes it possible to have books printed and delivered, a single copy at a time. Is this what Print On Demand technology will look like in the not-so-distant future? From The Telegraph:

Crime and Punishment may take the average reader several months to complete, but Britain’s first “book vending machine” can print you a copy in just nine minutes.

A freshly-bound edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic -- ordered by The Daily Telegraph -- was one of the first tomes to drop out of the Espresso Book Machine when it opened for business for the first time yesterday.

The novel is one of more than 400,000 titles including many rare and out-of-print books that can be printed on demand at Blackwell bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London.

The bookstore of the future, then, might look very different, indeed. Not shelf upon shelf of books, but row upon row of machines churning out custom copies for waiting customers. Between that and the electronic streams of the e-books whizzing by, it’s possible that, a few years hence, bookstores will be very different places, indeed.

While that idea makes me a little sad, it has a hopeful edge. Back at Blackwell, The Telegraph’s copy of Crime and Punishment was better than all right:

The hefty work that skidded out of the chute, while slightly sticky to the touch, looked and felt like a standard edition, even down to the correct ISBN number on the back.

The paper and ink are the same quality used in larger presses, and the binding appeared flawless.

Phill Jamieson, head of marketing at Blackwell, said that the firm was uncertain how the £68,000 machine -- one of only three such printers in the world -- would be used during its three-month trial period.

And the moral of the story? It seems entirely possible that the death of the book so many have been forceasting will never come. We love our books. Witness the many thousands of readers that pass through January Magazine every day, not to mention other online magazines and blogs and discussion groups and book groups and all of this without even leaving the online world.

At their core and at heart, books themselves will not change. However, how the publishing industry delivers our books, how they sell and market and get them to the consumer, all of that might change quite a bit.

Consider a world without remainders. Now that doesn’t sound so bad.

Ten Points For Mr. Happy

We’ve been predicting this for a while, but now The New York Times is agreeing with us, so it must be true. (Right? Right?)

According to Motoko Rich, recession weary consumers may be cutting back on many luxuries, but one they’re willing to pay for is a happy ending.

At a time when booksellers are struggling to lure readers, sales of romance novels are outstripping most other categories of books and giving some buoyancy to an otherwise sluggish market.

Harlequin Enterprises, the queen of the romance world, reported that fourth-quarter earnings were up 32 percent over the same period a year earlier, and Donna Hayes, Harlequin’s chief executive, said that sales in the first quarter of this year remained very strong. While sales of adult fiction overall were basically flat last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, the romance category was up 7 percent after holding fairly steady for the previous four years.

Motoko goes on to say that these numbers might be helped by the fact that the category generally offers up many titles in the less expensive mass market format. And romance isn’t the only area to be lit by the glow of a recession-era bounce:

Such escapist urges are also fueling sales of science fiction and fantasy, said Bob Wietrak, a vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble. Mr. Wietrak said sales of novels with vampires, shape shifters, werewolves and other paranormal creatures were “exploding,” whether they were found in the romance, fantasy or young-adult aisles, where Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series continues to dominate and inspire look-alike books like the House of Night teen novels by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast.

The New York Times piece is here.

Books in Canada “Staple Not a Luxury”

Amid all the doom and gloom everyone keeps forecasting around the global economic crisis, it’s lovely to be able to share some really good news, not only for retailers, but for literacy.

BookNet Canada, the not-for-profit agency that watches book-related goings on in Canada, reports today that Canadian book sales have continued to show steady growth in the first quarter of 2009 over the same time period last year. Sales volume is up 6.7 per cent in the first three months of this year.

Michael Tamblyn, BookNet Canada’s CEO, sounds optimistic for the industry. “This was when the other shoe was supposed to drop, after Christmas when gift sales were no longer a factor. But in the face of declining book sales in the US and UK, we are still seeing steady performance in English-language Canadian book sales in Q1.”

Tamblyn feels that the numbers might indicate a change in perspective. “For the time being, Canadians continue to view books as a staple, not a luxury.”

BookNet offers up reporting information here.

Belarusian Wine Retailer Tweets His Way to Lucrative Book Deal

This is the sort of news that seems intended to annoy people who follow the book industry closely and who have, in recent weeks, tired of hearing about cutbacks and layoffs and other fallout laid at the feet of economic downturn. From a Wall Street Journal piece by Sara Nelson:

HarperStudio has signed a seven-figure, 10-book deal with Gary Vaynerchuk, a 33-year-old Belarusian-born wine retailer from New Jersey, who, except for a talk show appearance here and there, is basically unknown in mainstream media circles.

But in the world of the Internet, he is a Twitter phenom, with 145,000 followers hanging on his every tweet. What began as a daily video blog about wine has become a self-help, business-advice juggernaut, with “Garyvee” as chief engineer. As he describes himself online, “I love people, and the hustle.” The first book in his series, “Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World,” lands in stores in September.

It’s an interesting piece and Nelson asks the seven-figure 10-book deal question:

But is a marketer/blogger, who cheerfully admits he doesn’t read books, going to be able to sell them to other Internet types who probably don’t read much either?

Plus, essentially, why buy the cow when Twitter keeps tweeting up the milk for free?

With past blog-inspired bombs to measure against and anticipating the literary merit of a fortune cookie, one would think the answer would be fairly obvious. The fall book season will tell, though.

Nelson’s piece is thought-provoking and right here.

Barbarians at the Gates

As an observer of the woes to publishing and literacy coming from the effects of the global economic meltdown, I was dismayed to read that reading and book-selling in general are under severe pressure. In fact one of the reasons I’ve not posted for a while is that I have been busy keeping my own business interests afloat when many around me are looking for government life-rafts.

To cope with the despair and pervasive gloom, I find reading novels to be the best form of escape in these surreal times. In my opinion -- and that of many other observers -- reading is integral to a healthy society, especially in the young. However, even any positive news relating to books and publishing in today’s business environment is bittersweet. For many book buyers, there has never been a better time to snag bargains especially in the used-book market as many people cull their bookshelves, looking to convert printed words into cash. Last week Forbes reported that Portland, Oregon-based Powell’s Books is seeing a huge surge in people selling their old books. While bookselling has never been more challenging and the woes from the United States have started to spread to the United Kingdom, there was a surreal story that The Guardian reported on Saturday of a most bizarre book sale:

In the end it was difficult to say whether it was a book lover's wildest, happiest dream -- or a worst nightmare.

From dawn till dusk yesterday thousands of bibliophiles, not to mention a good few traders who were looking to turn a quick profit, plundered a giant warehouse brimming with free books.

Some loaded up their cars with mostly second-hand novels, biographies, reference books and magazines.

Others, including ones who had travelled hundreds of miles to join in the legal looting, drove vans straight into the heart of the warehouse and crammed in their choice of dog-eared treasures.

Those who had no cars carried books home in sagging bags and crates, pushed them away in shopping trolleys or in prams or wobbled away on bikes.

Tables, chairs, bookshelves were also carted out. The south-west had not seen anything like it since the scenes of plundering on Branscombe Beach in Devon when the container ship Napoli spilled crates of goodies on to the shingle.

The frenzy was the result of a book retailer moving out of a warehouse it leased on a trading estate in Bristol but leaving its books behind -- hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of them. The owners of the warehouse, which covers more than an acre, invited local people to help themselves to any books they wanted.

The Daily Mail opted for high drama and shocking photos:

The treasure hunters stand knee-deep in Danielle Steels, Len Deightons and Jeffrey Archers, hoping to find more exotic literary fare.

This is the scene at a huge book warehouse whose contents are being given away after they were abandoned.

Seeing the photographs makes me wonder if the barbarians really are inching over to our gates. The Chinese have a famous proverb which doubles up as a warning “May you live in interesting times.” Seeing those photos reinforces my view that we certainly do.

Translating Their Way to Publishing Success

We’ve had enough hard news from the publishing trenches of late. Good news was bound to come eventually. We just didn’t expect it from such an unlikely source.

Imagine: a small New York-based publisher kicking things up old-school by translating little known European works of literary fiction and publishing them and making a profit without the aid of either vampires or magical boys. Impossible? One would think so. The New York Times’ Motoko Rich says no:

It does not sound like a recipe for publishing success: a roster of translated literary novels written mainly by Europeans, relying heavily on independent-bookstore sales, without an e-book or vampire in sight.

But that is the formula that has fueled Europa Editions, a small publisher founded by a husband-and-wife team from Italy five years ago. As large New York publishing houses have laid off staff, suffered drastically reduced book sales and struggled to adjust to a digital future, Europa turned its first profit last year and is enjoying a modest but growing following.

The company, which operates out of a pair of tiny offices near Union Square in Manhattan, also has its first best seller with “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” a French novel by Muriel Barbery narrated by a secretly intellectual concierge in a fashionable Parisian apartment building and a precocious preteen girl who lives there with her wealthy family. Filled with philosophical ruminations and copious references to literature, art, film and music, the book is in many ways as much of a surprise hit as its publisher.

The piece is lengthy, detailed, interesting and here.

Regional Book Events Make Nothing But Sense

I felt very honored to be asked to give a presentation about my most recent book at the Western Book Rep Association’s spring Book Fair in Victoria, British Columbia yesterday. It’s a great event and I met a lot of interesting and passionate people; people who care about books.

The WBRA does this twice a year: one in late winter in Victoria, then one in summer in Vancouver. It’s very intimate but superbly functional. A small trade fair. Some professional development. I’m not sure how many people attend, but I would guess it’s under 500 in total. Perhaps even fewer. Honestly: were you to attend the entire event from start to finish, you would have a reasonable expectation of meeting everyone if you were so inclined. So “intimate” really does cover it. I was only there for one evening and one morning but in that time, I heard a lot of laughter and a good number of interesting conversations. It’s a great event.

Like a lot of Canadians in book-related industries, I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to the state of trade book events in this country of late. I even editorialized a bit about it in this space last week. Because, of course, BookExpo Canada -- the Canadian sister fair to BookExpo America that was held by the same company -- died a fairly unlamented death recently. Unlamented because, according to most of the people I’ve spoken with about it, BEC came out of the gate broken and just kept getting worse. Bottom line: it was expensive for most people to get to and since its usefulness for booksellers was never that clear, it got to be less and less important to the industry. And now it’s gone. The only question now is: what happens next?

Since Reed announced BEC’s death, several people have mentioned how powerful small, regional exhibitions can be. Having now experienced WBRA’s wonderful Book Fair I completely get that. At the Book Fair, a handful of invited authors spend a generous amount of face time with the people who will ultimately be selling their books to the public. Since it is a regional fair, those same booksellers enjoy meeting the actual reps who manage their accounts and perhaps the occasional sales V.P. who has come out to add their expertise. That’s a very different story than one finds at the large centralized bookfairs of yore, where senior executives could be counted on to spend very little time at the booth, opting instead to give their time to larger clients. Which means that most booksellers -- i.e. most small independent bookstore owners -- quite often ended up at the booth talking to whatever publishing company staffer could be tricked into spending time there.

In a country as large as Canada, small regional book events are the logical next step. Richer experiences for booksellers and publishers and less investment for everyone, in terms of both travel and venue outlay, it’s an idea that makes nothing but sense.

Meanwhile, the book industry in Canada is aquiver with discussion about what will take the place of the BookExpo, for several years the central bookfest. Some of those answers might come in Toronto in June at BookCamp. The Quill & Quire blog adds the 4-1-1 here.

Video Book: What’s Wrong with this Picture?

HarperCollins has a new solution for people who lack the time to read: the video book. Paid Content reports:

For those who don’t have the time to listen to an audiobook, let alone read a hardback or e-Book, HarperCollins brings you: the video book.

Way to go, Harper: sounds like you just invented television.

The piece in question is here.

Meanwhile, still on the HarperCollins front, BookArmy, the book recommendation site the company has been scheming on for a while, has been put on hold while Authonomy, the social networking site they launched last September, continues to chug along.

Not Much Surprise About BookExpo Canada’s Demise

Though some media are acting surprised by Reed Exhibitions’ pulling the plug on their BookExpo Canada event in June and others are chalking it up to yet another bite from a hungry economy, it seems to me that the answer is somewhat more simple. The book industry in Canada never seemed that comfortable with the Reed-run events, which were always essentially little more than smaller, lamer versions of Reed’s big U.S. book event.

The fact is, the Canadian book industry is different than the one that serves the American market. There are some important differences in both the culture of the book industry in both countries as well as the culture itself. Who would even imagine that simply scaling down and laming up a formula that works well in one country is going to work in another, different one? The idea defies logic.

I never heard anyone going into raptures about BookExpo Canada, the way some exhibitors and attendees can about the U.S. event. In fact, the reverse was true: you’d hear lots of grumbling and dissatisfaction and not a lot of scurrying about on the Reed end to put things right.

Like many of the book industry shifts that are being attributed to the economy, the end of BookExpo Canada is happening now, but it was a long time coming and no one I’ve talked to sound either very surprised or exceedingly disappointed.

Part of this is due the fact that good things are on the horizon: things that make sense in this economy and the culture of the Canadian market. Bookbrunch UK talked to Kim McArthur, “the effervescent founder and President and Publisher of McArthur & Company,” who said she was in favor of an event modeled on the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute. Says McArthur:

It was really impressive -- two days of educational seminars for booksellers, with a keynote breakfast with industry leaders (Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, Bob Miller of Hyperion, Nan Graham of Scribners). Participating publishers of all sizes, from the smallest indie to the largest multinational, had two rounds of ‘speed dating,’ pitching their spring lists to the 500 booksellers in attendance, going from table to table where the booksellers were sitting.

McArthur even feels it may still be possible to organize a Canadian event for this year.

According to Publishers Weekly, Susan Dayus, executive director of the Canadian Booksellers Association, said she still believes “there is a need for a national gathering of booksellers, publishers, authors and others connected to the book industry.”

She said the CBA is looking at the possibility of launching a new event this year. She noted that the association had always held its annual general meeting in conjunction with a convention and said the CBA will immediately begin exploring the feasibility of putting some sort of show together, but was uncertain what form it would take.

The Bookbrunch article is here. The PW piece is here.

Rare Books Roadshow

Would you love to get your mitts on a book late rocker Jim Morrison created with his own doomed hands? What about a handwritten manuscript fragment by Marcel Proust? Or maybe you’re sitting on a book that you just know is valuable and, short of chasing down the Antiques Roadshow, you don’t know what to do with it?

If any of these questions makes your heart pitter patter, start making plans to get to the 42nd annual California International Antiquarian Book Fair which gets underway later this month at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco. With over 240 rare booksellers from around the world converging on the Bay area, this is the largest antiquarian book fair in the United States.

Dealers will be offering rare and antiquarian books, manuscripts and other related materials priced from just a couple of bucks to hundreds of thousands. Collectors will find early printed books and manuscripts, illustrated books, fine bindings, early American and European literature, modern first editions, books for children, maps, autographs, ephemera and antiquarian books on every imaginable subject.

Those with questions about their own treasures can bring their rare books to the fair on Discovery Day, February 15th between 1:30 and 3 pm for a free appraisal. Experts will offer informal appraisals for up to three books. As part of the Discovery Day activities two related sessions are available: “Book Collecting 101” and “What is This Book Worth” should both offer a wealth of information for the new collector.

The California International Antiquarian Book Fair runs from February 13th until the 15th. You can visit the event Web site for full information.

All the King’s Men

The big news in the book world yesterday was the announcement -- long rumored -- that The Washington Post would discontinue the dead-tree version of its long-running book section. From Motoko Rich of 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.

On the surface of things, that announcement sounds somewhat scary. But once you get past Rich’s sky-is-falling opening paragraphs, you see that the situation is not quite so dire as it seems. For one thing, Book World will continue to be available in the newspaper’s Web version. For another, it will put in occasional appearances “as a stand-alone print section oriented around special themes like summer reading or children’s books.”

The fact is, book reviews aren’t the only things getting hit in the newspaper business these days: the entire industry is in crisis. The biggest problem: fewer people are reading newspapers. Advertisers know this, and so fewer of them are willing to pony up their currently scarce dollars to put an ad in front of maybe not that many people.

In the death spiral in which the newspaper business currently finds itself, shrinking book review space is the least of the industry’s worries. And, truly? It’s the least of our worries, as well. Newspapers in crisis mean reporters’ jobs in jeopardy and a threat, ultimately, to the way news sections are supplied with their material. And without real journalists digging up real news for real newspapers, we are ultimately going to be in real trouble. Really.

One of the things that just kills me is that the whole loss of book review space was avoidable. Book industry leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided some time ago that, of all the products in the world that could be sold by advertising, theirs was immune. Newspapers aren’t cutting review space because they don’t like books: they’re cutting it because advertisers aren’t supporting said space. You don’t see broadsheets cutting their entertainment sections, do you? And why? Because movie companies know how to sell their products and keep the review pipeline open at the same time. Here’s the Times again:

As it happens, Book World never garnered much advertising from publishers, who generally spend very little on newspaper ads. Publishers now focus their marketing dollars on cooperative agreements with chain bookstores, which guarantee that certain books will receive prominent display at the front of stores.

So the problem of shrinking review space is solvable: if publishers started advertising their products in newspapers, said papers would happily increase the space devoted to book coverage. That’s just how it works: there is always a predetermined advertising-to-editorial ratio. And everyone goes away happy.

Meanwhile, back in reality, books coverage is really the teensiest problem on the print media’s plate. With readers falling away by the busload, newspaper publishers are busily rethinking everything about their business. People still need news, we know that. But how to get it to them? Television has proven to be a candy floss medium for news delivery. And bloggers can’t function in a vacuum. I mean, truly: imagine Watergate in the era of blogs. Wonderful! Now imagine it without Woodward and Bernstein. You see what I’m saying? Without them, we’re sunk.

So don’t go away sad or even mad. Go away and think about how you’d like news -- real news -- delivered. We need it: that’s clear. What is not yet known is exactly what form it will take. But whatever one it does? I’m betting books coverage will be a part of the package.

Is Publishing Broken?

Though a lot of people have been forecasting doom and gloom for the publishing industry, some of us have remained confident that not all change is bad. As we remarked in our Best Books of 2008 feature back in December:

The sky is falling. And it has been for some time. The past 12 months have produced the sorts of calamities that can start panics. And it seems that, as delighted with the economy as everyone seemed to be 12 and certainly 24 months ago, they are now willing to believe it’s all coming apart. The reality is this: you must have downs. If you did not, how would you even recognize the ups? It’s all physics. There’s change ahead? Sure. But there’s always change. That’s just how we humans roll.

In the new issue of Time Magazine, on sale today, Lev Grossman offers up a sharp assessment of publishing as we find it at the earliest part of the 21st century. As Grossman points out:

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since -- well, since the early 18th century. The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

But what, exactly, does that look like? As Grossman points out, there are many possibilities. It’s enjoyable to look over his shoulder at his crystal ball. While he’s about it, he considers some of the things that aren’t right with the industry:

What’s the Matter with Publishing?

It isn’t the audience. People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years. So that's not the problem. What is?

Grossman’s piece is lengthy, well considered and it’s here.

Making Tracks for Abu Dhabi

It will be interesting to see if the international economic downturn has much impact on the 19th annual Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, to be held this year on March 17th to 22nd.

Dubbed the “Middle East’s fastest growing book fair,” the 2008 event hosted 482 exhibitors from 42 countries. The Gulf News sounds optimistic:

Hundreds of book publishers from around the world are due to take to participate in this year’s Abu Dhabi book fair from March 17 to 22, organizers said.

The 19th edition of the fair is expected to be the largest this year with variety cultural programmes said Mohammed Khalaf Al Mazroui, General Manager of Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach): “The fair is becoming one of the fast growing book fairs in the Middle East and it is becoming more professional and attracts more publishers and intellectuals” he said.

The Web site for the event assures potential visitors that Abu Dhabi is plenty safe and that, should they decided to make the trek, they won’t lack for activities:

Abu Dhabi is fast becoming a beacon of culture in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and Western Asia. Recent developments include a campus of the Sorbonne, a future New York University Campus, branches of Sotheby’s and Christies and a satellite of the New York Film Academy. In addition, plans have been finalised for the Saadiyad Island Cultural District in Abu Dhabi, including the first branch of the Louvre outside of Paris and the world’s largest Guggenheim Museum.

Dangerous Book Recalled

Unlike other books that have been called “dangerous” throughout history, Taunton Press’ 3rd edition of Wiring a House isn’t likely to lead to inflammatory ideas. Still -- and arguably -- fear of fire might be exactly what’s involved in a recent recall of two of the publisher’s books. From CBC:

Taunton Press is recalling about 64,000 copies of Wiring a House, 3rd Edition and Wiring Complete, Expert Advice from Start to Finish because the book includes incorrect information about how to install and repair electrical wiring, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Tuesday.

Taunton Press’ own recall notice -- for both Wiring a House, 3rd Edition, by Rex Cauldwell and Wiring Complete, by Michael Litchfield and Michael McAlister, is here.

In fairness, it should be mentioned that Taunton produces some really fantastic -- and completely not dangerous -- books and magazines. Their main Web site -- complete with prominent links to the recall notice -- is here.

Amazon Gobbles Used Book E-Tailer

On a day when the stock market was bleeding, Amazon announced that it had acquired the Canada-based used book e-tailer, AbeBooks. A press release dated December 1st said that Amazon was announcing:

the completion of its acquisition of AbeBooks. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books, with over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world. Amazon.com previously announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire AbeBooks on Aug. 1, 2008.

AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. AbeBooks will maintain all its Web sites, including its Canadian Web site. The Web sites will continue to have country-specific content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews of Canadian writers.

Which sent me scurrying over there looking for content, as I hadn’t realized they generated any. And it’s there: I found it. But they do an excellent job of keeping it buried.

Not sure what this merger will mean, but it’s nice to hear about growth and acquisitions at a time when a lot of news has been less than good.

In the War on Books, Does the Internet Win?

What has the Internet meant for us as a culture? What havoc has it wreaked on the culture of books? More: in an all out battle -- books vs. the ‘Net -- who wins?

The answer, according to Air America’s Beau Friedlander, writing for The Los Angeles Times, is not as simple as it might at first appear:

Books require a different sort of communion with one’s subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory -- more tactile, more participatory. I know more or less where, folio-wise, Eliot gets nasty about the Jews in his infamous 1933 lecture series “After Strange Gods,” but I always have to read around a bit to find the exact quote, and the time spent softens the bite of his anti-Semitism because the hateful remarks were made amid smart ones. For literary works, books are still, and most likely always will be, indispensable.

But not all nonfiction requires that depth. I asked “Freakonomics” co-author Stephen Dubner how the Internet is changing writing and more generally the way we think.

“The crabbiness,” he says, “that emanates from a certain breed of thinker/writer -- a breed that I generally admire, by the way -- about how the Internet’s cornucopia of information is destroying book culture is based on fear of change more than anything. Most people don't even like to change the part in their hair; asking them to accept a change in the way words are disbursed through culture is a bit much.”

The LA Times piece is lengthy, magnificent and right here.

Bookbrowse Unveils Facelift

Bookbrowse, “your guide to exceptional books,” today unveiled a complete redesign that promises to bring the online publication’s content to readers in a fresher, more effective style.

“Our original site layout was effective,” says Bookbrowse founder and CEO Davina Morgan-Witts, “but over time had begun to look outdated. As we were constantly adding new content and capabilities, the older layout was becoming more difficult and complicated to use. We needed to go back to our core value -- recommending only the best current books and providing all of the information a visitor needs to find the book that’s just right for them -- and rebuild around that user-centric objective.”

Morgan-Witts adds that the 11-year-old site will continue to offer in-depth reviews and the stories behind the books as well as previews of upcoming books, their bank of author bios and interviews as well as advice on starting and running a book club and other book club rich features and the ability to browse and cross reference by more than 70 themes, including by time period and geographical setting.

“Initial feedback has been excellent,” says Morgan-Witts of the redesign. “We set ourselves aggressive targets, and I am proud to say that we have met them.”

The newly redesigned Bookbrowse is here. The current week’s recommendations are here. Information on the enhanced content available to Bookbrowse members is here.

Oprah Goes “Gaga” for E-Book Reader

The book world knows that a nod from Oprah Winfrey can cause sales to rocket and alter careers. But now Amazon boss Jeff Bezos must be wondering if the Oprah-effect will cause a similar sales eruption for electronic readers after the Chicago-based television host waxed enthusiastic about Amazon’s Kindle last Friday. From the Seattle P.I.:

Winfrey went nuts over the device -- stomping her feet, waving her arms and shaking her fists with excitement. She said she received one of Amazon.com’s electronic book readers as a gift over the summer and it changed her life.

Members of the audience each got free Kindles. The women shrieked with joy after unwrapping the devices. The camera cut to one woman who was crying.

Amazon, of course, was delighted. Amazon.com sported an Oprah show preview on its home page Friday. CEO Jeff Bezos was a guest on the show, appearing bewildered at his luck.

He didn’t say much -- but he didn’t have to. Winfrey was sold.

“When I get something this great I have to share it with everybody,” Winfrey said. “For those of you at home, I’m sorry I couldn’t get you all one at home too. ... I’m really not a gadget person at all, but I have fallen in love with this thing.”

The electronic book industry has been collecting itself for success for much of the last decade. A new generation of electronic readers have put slicker, smaller and more easy to use reading devices into the hands of hundreds of thousands of readers over the last year or so. This combined with such a glowing endorsement from the queen of books seems likely to push the electronic book into the stratosphere. It’s possible that Winfrey has opened the floodgates on a brand new day.

A Puddle of Calm for Global Panic

The Frankfurt Book Fair kicked off yesterday with perhaps less than its customary sizzle. As the Guardian’s books blog reports, this year’s Fair is a puddle of “calm amid global panic.”

Hundreds of thousands of people who love books all in the same place - it must be fun, right? Not exactly. Frankfurt Book Fair, which kicked off today, might be buzzy, busy, exhilarating, exhausting – but most people aren't here to muck about. The biggest event of the year for the publishing industry, this is where the deals are made, from foreign rights in an obscure British textbook to the mega-bucks deal for the yet-to-emerge “book of the fair” (which at the London Book Fair in 2007, incidentally, was Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning The White Tiger).

Part of the reason for the ultra-calm is due the nature of the Frankfurt Fair. Though this is a large and important stop for the international book scene, Frankfurt is known more as a rights fair than anything else: the place where publishers and their agents go to buy and sell international rights to new and already published works. As the Guardian explains:

Although there are lots of authors here (Orhan Pamuk, Karin Slaughter and Gunter Grass, to name a few), this is really a trade event. The German public will descend en masse come the weekend to snaffle new titles from their favourite authors, but for the rest of the week, it's business first.

And of course, the big question on everyone’s mind is this: how will an international financial crisis impact on the book industry? The answer: it already has.

There are fewer exhibitors here than there were last year (7,373 compared to 7,448), and a recent survey of 90 German publishers shows that business was down 3% in Germany over the first nine months of the year.

But publishers here are resolutely optimistic about the fate of books in a recession - one agent said that “books are good in the good times, and great in the bad times”. In the words of Richard Charkin, former Macmillan chief, now Bloomsbury executive director, “banks may crash, derivatives flounder, hedge funds wither, dotcoms rise and fall but somehow or other writers, publishers, booksellers, literary agents, publishing consultants and old bookish friends always manage to congregate for the autumnal bunfight known by the single word, Frankfurt”.

Personally, I’m with Louise Tucker who offers up a thoughtful “Prescription for Thrift” for the Fifth Estate:

I’m not sure that a few sessions with Alain de Botton could do much for our failing banking system but, unlike the economy and the economists, most of us are not beyond bibliotherapy. For a start, compared to a cinema ticket in London, a £7.99 paperback is still a bargain, since, if loved, it provides several hours, or even years in the rereading, of pleasure. Having scoured my shelves at work and at home I came up with three suitable books for this current climate: two practical and one pleasurable.

Tucker hits it perfectly, too, going from necessary generalities to ending on a specific:

My final prescription is for a novel, for my favourite life-affirming, light at the end of a tunnel book: The Shipping News. If Quoyle can survive his various depressions and disasters on the bleak Newfoundland coast then so can we all…

One can almost -- thought not quite -- take that to the bank.

Age-Rating Books for Children: Right or Wrong?

While BBC News today asks if age-rating books books for children is right or wrong, I think a better question might be: useful or not? Do parents really need someone else’s opinion on what reading material is “suitable” for their children? Some publishers in the UK seem to think so because, later this year, a scheme to add an “age band” to books will begin:

Each book will carry a specific marking indicating whether they are suitable for readers aged 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen.

Research within the book industry suggests people buying books for children would welcome the guidance.

The mere suggestion of an age writing system for books strikes me as ridiculous and even wrong. I’m not alone in my reaction. Some 750 authors and illustrators have gotten together and formed a group called No to Age Banding. The authors speaking out against age-rating books include Terry Pratchett, Andrew Morton, Anne Fine, JK Rowling, Celia Rees, Neil Gaiman, Roddy Doyle, David Almond, Allan Guthrie, Diana Wynne Jones, Anthony Horowitz and many, many others. The reasons they offer against age banding books are compelling. Here are a few of them:

• Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.

• Children easily feel stigmatized, and many will put aside books they might love because of the fear of being called babyish. Other children will feel dismayed that books of their “correct” age-group are too challenging, and will be put off reading even more firmly than before.

• Age-banding seeks to help adults choose books for children, and we’re all in favour of that; but it does so by giving them the wrong information. It’s also likely to encourage over-prescriptive or anxious adults to limit a child’s reading in ways that are unnecessary and even damaging.

We agree. If you do to, you can visit the No to Age Banding Web site and add your voice to the growing number already there.

Signing Books Without All the Heavy Lifting

It would be easy to think that top-selling authors are a lot of lazy louts. First, as The Guardian points out, you had JT LeRoy hiring stand-ins for public appearances, then Margaret Atwood cooked up her LongPen so that authors could sign at a distance. Now an anonymous publisher is using Craigslist to hire people to fake signatures. From The Guardian:

One smart publisher seems to have devised a way of easing the pain for the millionaire bestseller writer: they have posted an advert on the listing site, Craigslist, inviting a team of part-time workers to fake the signatures and get paid in cash for the privilege.

The advert says it is looking for 14 people who can do a blitz of false autograph signing on behalf of two unnamed co-authors of a newly released, and equally anonymous, book.

And I love this part, where The Guardian gets down and dirty and does the math:

The advert says the fake signing, to be held in Los Angeles, will run over two days at eight hours a day.

Each signing will take 15 seconds or less, and at that rate the team of 14 could sign up to 53,760 copies.

What’s next? No, never mind. Don’t answer that. The possibilities are endless. And I guess we’ll tell you about it when they come. Meanwhile, here’s The full piece from The Guardian.

“Philistine Blunder” Cry LA Times Editors

Four past book editors of The Los Angeles Times have gotten together to let people know they “are dismayed and troubled at the decision by Sam Zell and his managers to cease publishing the paper’s Sunday Book Review.”

Sonja Bolle, Digby Diehl, Jack Miles and Steve Wasserman only barely contain their venom when they write that “Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.” They call for “readers and writers alike to join with us as we protest this sad and backward step.”

LA Observed runs the letter from the editors in its entirety here and brings news of the “new upscale magazine” being launched in relative editorial secrecy here. While Publishers Weekly offers up a bit of backstory here.

Silence Falls on Publishing News

The two trade publications that represent the book business in the United Kingdom are The Bookseller and Publishing News. I know many of their writers, so it was with alarm that I read this:

PUBLISHING NEWS, THE book trade weekly, is to cease publication. The issue of Friday July 25th will be the last. The news was announced in a statement today (Wednesday, July 15 2008).

The publication, founded in 1979, has been hit by the same problems that have affected all magazines and newspapers, as advertisers have shifted increasing proportions of their spend to online and direct sales. PNL’s founder and Chairman, Fred Newman, commented: “This has been a sad and difficult decision to make, but the nature of the book trade which today offers a multiplicity of ways for publishers to sell books both to booksellers and to consumers has changed dramatically. For the biggest book publishers, the trade press is now only one of many options for the promotion and sale of their titles.”

This is yet another symptom of the global economic downturn and the transfer from print publication to online, with many advertisers joining the migration. It is not all bad news however -- even though this is only keeping a brave face on such terrible news.

Newman stressed that all other activities of PN Ltd are unaffected by the closure of Publishing News. The company will continue to organise the British Book Awards and has recently signed a new two-year contract with its headline sponsor, Galaxy.

Read the full report here, while rival The Bookseller reports here.

Summer Publishing Program Full Steam Ahead

The Summer Publishing Workshops at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University began on July 2nd and run until August 2nd, offering programs in four areas of publishing: books, magazines, editing and design.

The program began at The Banff Centre in the early 1980s and was shifted and honed in the mid-1990s when it was moved to SFU. The program is well-attended by publishing professionals from around the world who come to learn and to take the pulse of the industry through the carefully monitored and nurtured set of programs. SFU tells us that, this year, “more than 100 faculty, and approximately 450 participants, will come to SFU Vancouver in the downtown core for 38 workshops in books, magazines, editing, and design.”

Participants take part in one and two-week immersion workshops offering hands-on projects, lectures and discussions. Included are Book Publishing Immersion, Book Editing Immersion and the Book Cover Design Intensive. As well, a series of shorter workshops and lectures are offered.

The full slate of programs can be viewed here. As well, the 2008 Symposium on the Book will take place on July 12th. This year’s program features a tight look inside crime and thriller writing:

Six of Canada’s top crime writers join a crime fiction book reviewer, an editor of crime writing, and a mystery bookstore owner to discuss the subgenres of crime writing – thrillers, mysteries, cozies, detectives and true crime – and will also engage the audience with an in-depth look at the position of crime writing in Canada.

Panelists include William Deverell, Anne Emery, Daniel Kalla, Anita Daher, Michael Slade, Margaret Cannon, Dinah Forbes, Walter Sinclair, Mary Jane Maffini (who will moderate the proceedings) and January Magazine editor and co-founder, Linda L. Richards. Registration information can be found here.