The E-Book Wars Have Really Begun

It seems quite likely that we will look back on this week as the moment when the e-book wars officially began. We may have forgotten it, but electronic books of one kind or another have been with us for a couple of decades (beginning with ill-fated ventures into books on CD).  For most of that time, the actual market was negligibly small. In the last few years the e-book market became significant, but although it generated vast amounts of chatter—ranging from dark mutterings by publishers to utopian visions from technophiles—a sort of uneasy calm prevailed at the frontier where authors and agents, publishers, and Amazon and its competitors eyed each other warily.  There were occasional skirmishes and plenty of saber-rattling (over matters such as Kindle prices or Digital Rights Management) but no party seemed ready to make a move aggressive enough to start a real fight.

But that has now changed—inevitably, because the e-book market has exploded and digital books are the hottest (perhaps the only) growth area in the industry. The calm is over, and real punches are being thrown. You might say the first jab came from three houses (Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins) who announced they were going to delay releasing e-books of their titles until several months after hardcover publication. I agree with the analysis of Mike Shatzkin that these houses are not so much concerned over pub dates as trying to find some leverage to use with Amazon over the pricing issue. 

But the timing kerfuffle was minor compared to the dustup that broke out on Friday when Random House CEO Markus Dohle declared, with chutzpah one can only admire, that the house controls e-book rights for thousands of backlist titles whose contracts made no mention of such rights. This was drawing a line far out in the sand.  Dohle’s bold assertion is, essentially, that e-books are just another kind of “book,” so the contractual language that gives Random exclusivity over all editions of a work includes e-books—even though they had not been invented at the time most of these contracts were signed. 

It’s hard to believe Random can make this claim with a straight face. They went to court with this argument years ago and didn’t get very far. But you can see why they’re trying it on. At stake is potentially millions of dollars in backlist revenue that the house could lose out on if authors take e-rights of their old titles elsewhere.  Even though Random’s argument may be legally weak, by making a show of defending this territory they are presumably hoping to discourage authors from battling them for it. Agent Richard Curtis, who is himself a an e-publisher, observes at his blog, "Someone would have to have a lot at stake to be willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go up against Random House in court.”

Random may be betting that for individual authors, it won’t be worth the fight. But now that we are seeing explosive growth in e-book revenues, I believe there’s too much money at stake for authors not to contest this ground. The Authors Guild has already blasted back at Dohle, calling Random’s position on the backlist a “retroactive rights grab.”

The Guild also points out that Random House rewrote its contract boilerplate in 1994 and specifically added language to cover e-book rights, which wouldn’t seem to be necessary if they were already bundled in with the rights acquired. I worked at Random House at the time, and well remember sitting in meetings where we discussed the new contract language. I certainly don’t remember anyone saying, “well, we already have these rights, but let’s throw in some extra language about them just to make sure.” The conversations I recall were much more like, “Hm, our old contract language didn’t say anything about electronic books so we’d better make sure we get them from now on.”

In the end, just as the fight with Amazon over pub dates is largely about pricing, the fight over who owns backlist e-rights is largely about royalties. After all, Random House is a hugely potent marketer of books and content; to an author, it’s not clear there’s any company out there that’s going to do better selling your backlist title, and there’s clearly an advantage to marketing print and e-editions together. But Random is paying an e-book royalty of 25% of net receipts, while others offer a 50-50 split or better. That’s a lot to leave on the table.

And that brings us to the second roundhouse blow landed this week. I’ll talk about that in tomorrow’s post. 

(illustration: The Taking of Lone Pine  by Fred Leist) 

A Book-Lover's Stocking Stuffer

There are all sorts of momentous topics I could be writing about, like the battle instigated by Random House this week over e-book rights to backlist titles. But let's lighten up for a moment. With Christmas approaching, let me recommend a new offering from my colleagues at Bloomsbury that has made me laugh every time I opened it. If you're looking around for Christmas presents for your bibliophile friends--especially anyone in or around the publishing game--get your hands on a few copies of Do-It Yourself Brain Surgery, and Other Implausibly Titled Books. I can do no better than quote the catalogue description of this work:

The Diagram Prize is awarded by the Bookseller magazine each year to the book with the oddest title. Since its creation at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978, the Diagram has had some worthy winners, including Bombproof Your Horse, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and People Who Don't Know They're Dead.

And though these titles may seem like surefire winners, each year of this ingenious contest has seen stiff competition across all genres: fiction (Fabulous Small Jews, 2003); instructional (Knitting with Dog Hair, 1994); and even erotica (The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, 2002). Last year's competition featured I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen—which came in second. Here, collected for the first time, are the fifty best entries the Diagram has ever seen. Presented complete with their (equally outlandish) jackets, these books are memorable, perplexing, and riotously funny. A perfect gift for a book lover or anyone in need of a laugh. 

For some more of the goodies contained in this volume, see this post at the Los Angeles Times's Jacket Copy blog.

The Value of Prepub Reviews, or Why We're Going to Miss Kirkus

There was some wailing, and some gloating, at the news announced today that Nielsen, parent company of Kirkus Reviews, was closing the publication. Kirkus was one of the four sources of "advance," or prepublication, book reviews (along with Library Journal, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly). Those who gloated, like ICM agent Esther Newberg, noted that Kirkus was the prepub review most likely to be negative: in fact it was often kind and sometimes effusive, but it's true that the other three prepubs were less willing to slam a book.

Ironically, consumers at large often think that Kirkus or its kin are puff machines, simply because the only time the "reader in the street" sees a quote from Kirkus or PW, it's on a book jacket. All the prepubs are capable of a stern critique, but of course when Kirkus says a novel is "jejeune" or your bio is "boring," you don't see that on the back cover.

The truth is, it's precisely because they are sometimes negative that the prepubs have value. With thousands of titles being published every year, book editors, news producers, movie scouts--anyone trying to make sense of the tsunami of books--are desperate for anything that can help them weed through it.  Chip McGrath of the New York Times said, almost plaintively,
"At the very time that we're inundated with stuff, that's the moment when you also need some gatekeepers, tastemakers, guides. Not that any of these are foolproof, but without them, it's just sort of chaos. How do you get your head around it at all?" Booksellers and others commenting on the web and Twitter today had similar sentiments.

The former managing director of Kirkus wonders "whether the industry still needs advance reviews the way it used to. Like it or not, they’re worth less every day in a world where everyone’s sister’s friend has a handle or a blog like Readermommy or Bookluvah."

It seems to me that is exactly the point. Because there is such a cacophony of voices out there, where it could be the author's "sister's friend" touting a book, we need more services like Kirkus, not fewer. Especially because so many other trusted venues, such as newspaper and magazine book reviews, have also disappeared. I published a book--an excellent one, if I say so myself--this year that received only one single review. Yes, it was from Kirkus.

I'm honestly a bit surprised that, in this age of information overload, a viable business model can't be found for a service that provides quick, pithy, trusted reviews of forthcoming books. We keep hearing that the skill of "curation" and "filtering" is what is most in demand in a limitless marketplace. That's what the prepubs do. Kirkus may have been idiosyncratic or even unkind from time to time, but how is that different from any other reviewer?

I suspect that even those who have shed no tears for Kirkus Reviews may find they miss it when it's gone.

(Illustration: Hokusai, The Great Wave of Kanagawa)

What E-Readers Will Never Replace

Mor liked to tear a book apart as he read it, breaking the back, thumbing and turning down the pages, commenting and underling. He liked to have his books close to him, upon a table, upon the floor, at least upon open shelves. Seeing them so near and so destroyed, he could feel that they were now almost inside his head.   
--Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle

The Kindle and other e-readers have received an obsessive degree of attention in the press this year, with some people declaring the Kindle a great leap forward (see Jacob Weisberg in Slate) and others saying it's not nearly as good as a book. Nicholson Baker test-drove one for The New Yorker and found it disappointment: the screen "wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray." 

I'm a little surprised that so far, all the commentary I have read both pro and contra e-readers has focused almost entirely on the reading experience. Most people agree that a printed book--especially a well-designed, well-printed one--is more pleasurable to read, but Kindle partisans love the convenience of carrying many books in a one-book-sized package, not to mention the instant availability of so many titles. I was a Kindle early adopter and I can still remember the first time, stuck in an airport lounge, I zapped a book into my hands out of the ether. It felt like something out of Harry Potter. 

But as any book lover knows, the act of reading a book is only part of your experience of it. You have a relationship with the volume itself, not just with the text it contains. And the physical book, in fact, becomes the symbol of that relationship--in the precise sense that it partakes of what it signifies. When I sit in my armchair and look at my bookshelf across the room, the spines of each volume I've read summon up memories and sensations just as if I were going through a photo album.  

When I think of books I have loved, what comes to mind is not disembodied words, but the actual books. I can remember the way the type lay on the page, the feel of paper and binding in my fingers. But the intensity of my feeling for certain books isn't the product of their aesthetic quality--my disintegrating, shoddy paperback of Le Grand Meaulnes is just as numinous as four elegant hardcover volumes of Virginia Woolf essays that I have preserved much more carefully.

I have always felt slightly disappointed in myself as a reader because I treat books rather gently, unlike Iris Murdoch's Mor, who ravages his books in the course of reading them. It is only by almost destroying the printed pages that he gets them "inside his head." This passage captures something primal about how, in an almost literal sense, we consume writing. You can't consume an e-book quite the same way.

Don't get me wrong: I think my Kindle is great--and reading Kindle books on the iPhone, which I can carry in my pocket, is even better. For me, it's not while I read them, but afterward, that e-books fall short.  

Not only do I remember that magical moment in the airport lounge. I also remember when I turned, or rather clicked, the last page of my first Kindle purchase. Suddenly the book was gone--vanished back into the ether. Perhaps possessing books "in the cloud" alone is a purer way of appreciating literature. But I hope I will not be accused of Luddism or fetishizing print if I say that much as I love my Kindle, the satisfaction of closing a wonderful book and slipping it into a shelf in my library, where I can enjoy its company, will never be equaled by the satisfaction of watching a screen go blank.

(photo of Neil Gaiman's library via Shelfari.com)