In The Guardian’s Books Blog, Robert McCrum celebrates the rise of self-publishing.

The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible.

Jason Epstein attempts to foresee the digital future at The New York Review of Books.

Everyone is probably sick of the topic by now, but I would feel remiss were I not to note April L. Hamilton’s cogent take on the row between Macmillan and Amazon.

Charles Stross examines the spat between Macmillan and Amazon.

Computerworld notes the strong presence of e-readers at the Taipei International Book Exhibition.

The only company showing off color e-paper screens at the book fair was Taiwan’s Delta Electronics. The company displayed its new 13.1-inch e-readers made with e-paper technology from Japan’s Bridgestone at the book fair.

Delta plans to start marketing the new 13.1-inch color touchscreen e-reader around the end of the second quarter. The e-reader is the size of an A4 sheet of paper, suitable for viewing business documents. Bridgestone, well-known for its tire business, showed the 13.1-inch e-paper technology off last year at a show in Japan.

Richard Brooks at the Times writes about the finances of The London Review of Books.

Bookninja rounds up recent e-book rumblings.

Poets & Writers has a piece by Kevin Nance on Northwestern University’s gutting of its prize-winning journal TriQuarterly.

After the magazine’s final print issue this spring, it will become an online-only, student-run publication associated with Northwestern’s new MFA program in creative writing, located on its Chicago campus. The positions of the magazine’s longtime editor, Susan Firestone Hahn, and associate editor, Ian Morris, will be eliminated.

In the New York Times, Larry Rohter profiles Open Letter Books.

Here is a gathering of books that appeal to the sense of touch and the sense of sight. You will want to read them, of course, but in many cases you will also want to feel the quality of the paper and the binding and let the beauty of the reproductions fill your eyes. There could be no better gift at a time when the book business is on the defensive. These are books that cannot be repackaged as eBooks.

In The New Republic, Jed Perl shares his list of the year’s best art books.

At The Awl Choire Sicha writes about a curious inversion.

At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place.

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal reports that Random House again is making specious claims to digital rights.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich notes Barnes & Noble’s e-book plans.

In The Globe and Mail Andrew Nicoll, author of The Good Mayor, recounts how his former agent urged him to pose as a woman in order to sell his novel.

I am a bloke of the brick-outhouse variety, a little over 6 foot tall and a little under 280 pounds. In my youth I played a bit of rugby – which is like football but without the helmets. I am a heterosexual man with a 16-colour default setting, completely unable to tell cerise from fuschia; I couldn’t find “rose-whisper” on a colour chart with the aid of a sat-nav.

The Guardian has a gallery of submissions in the Designer Bookbinders International Competition.

Like the slavering maws of a multipartite mythological beast, the intentional flaws of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader swiftly swivel to rain disdainful and fetid organoleptic disaster upon all who dare approach the sacred mount.

At the Guardian Robert McCrum lists working titles of literary classics.

The Huffington Post has Mark Sarvas’s ridiculously ill-conceived essay on Amazon’s Kindle.

Of course, I’ll still love my library, love sitting amid my shelves, poking randomly through titles I haven’t considered in years. But the destiny of the book lies not in satisfying Luddites, curmudgeons and romantics, but rather in introducing a new generation of readers into the joys of literature and making sure that those words we spend all those years in lonely rooms writing will find as many readers as humanly – or digitally – possible.

The Wall Street Journal covers the Justice Department’s intensifying interest in the settlement between Google and publishers and authors.

In the Guardian, Alison Flood reports an unusual offer from Dave Eggers.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich covers BookExpo America.

There were the panels: “Giving It Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense and When They Don’t,” “Red Hot Readers: Market Adoption of Mobile eReading Devices” and “Jumping Off a Cliff: How Publishers Can Succeed Online Where Others Failed.” Tina Brown, rasping with a bad case of laryngitis, kick-started a discussion with the chief executives of four New York publishing houses by asking if they were shocked when Amazon.com began charging $9.99 for e-books — “that paltry, pitiful sum.”

At The Complete Review M. A. Orthofer laments the latest price increase of the New York Times.

In the Guardian, Justin McCurry covers the Japanese publication of 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s latest novel.

The debate over the novel’s title has yet to be settled, however. Some believe it was influenced by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, since the letter Q, when pronounced in English, is a homonym for the number nine in Japanese, pronounced “kyuu”.

Others insist that the title is a tribute to The True Story of Ah Q, a novella by the Chinese writer Lu Xun, whose work is said to have influenced Murakami.

GalleyCat notes that John Freeman has been appointed Acting Editor of Granta following Alex Clark’s departure.

At Publishers Weekly Jim Milliot reports a surge in on-demand and short run titles.

At the Guardian Stuart Evers argues that prodigies have taken over fiction.

At Inside Higher Ed Scott Jaschik reports hard times for university presses.

With some university presses facing budget cuts that could effectively kill their operations, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. But experts on literary magazines are nonetheless surprised — and worried — by the announcement this week out of Middlebury College that it will cease sponsorship of The New England Review by 2011 if the publication doesn’t become self-supporting.

At the Washington Post, Bob Thompson notes retrenchment in American publishing.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition profiles Barney Rosset.

At Salon Sarah Hepola reports the disappearance of gay-themed books from Amazon’s search results and sales rankings.

A young writer who turns up at the office of an editor or literary agent with a volume of stories is all but guaranteed a chilly, pitying welcome. That kind of thing is just not commercial.

In the New York Times, A. O. Scott praises the American short story.

In the New York Times, Miguel Helft covers a legal challenge to Google’s settlement with publishers and authors.

Opposition to the 134-page agreement, which the parties announced in October, has been building slowly as its implications have become clearer. Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School.

At the Globe and Mail Craig Boyko broaches the delicate subject of size.

I am not writing a novel.

The pressure to do so has been subtle but pervasive. It usually takes the form of the question, “So, are you working on a novel?” (The “yet” is implicit.)

This attitude is understandable coming from a publisher or agent, who after all wants to sell lots of your books (and short stories do not sell well), but it is surprising to hear it from other writers. Even the editor of a periodical that was publishing a story of mine once gushed, “You should write a novel!” It was meant as praise, I think.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo discovers e-books on Amazon’s Kindle platform.

Don’t get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn’t realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more. The book is so tactile and personal and much less ephemeral than the sort of stuff we read online.

Alison Flood at the Guardian notes that “debut novelist Joanna Smith Rakoff was forced to change the title of her book after it emerged that acclaimed Irish author Colm Tóibín had plumped for the same name for his own forthcoming novel.”

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a short segment on e-books and digital restrictions management.

The Village Voice has Eli Epstein-Deutsch’s profile of Cabinet magazine.

In the New York Times, Eric Pfanner notes increasing book sales in Europe.

Publishers and analysts offer a variety of reasons for the relative strength of the book market. Compared with a new television or video game console, books are inexpensive. With unemployment on the rise and working hours in decline, people may simply have more time on their hands. After the excesses of recent years, reading is an activity well suited to a more contemplative era.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich profiles Europa Editions.

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Lynn Neary covers publishers’ and booksellers’ objections to Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device, the second version of which was recently announced.

Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading interviews Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press about publishing in a recession.

The New York Review of Books has Robert Darnton’s analysis of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers.

. . . Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

What compels a man, 63, to run a side business in publishing books mainly of poems, as well as reprints of classics, in the year 2009? Not money.

Ian Shapira of the Washington Post profiles Roger Lathbury, principal of Orchises Press.

GalleyCat notes layoffs at Publishers Weekly.

Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

At Time Lev Grossman looks at publishing trends.

At National Public Radio, John Irving remembers Richard Seaver.

When I met Dick and Jeannette, I was recently divorced and spectacularly unreliable; I envied the obvious strength of the Seavers’ marriage and Jeannette’s superb cooking. Their youngest son, Nick, and my middle son, Brendan, were friends. In my wrestling room in Sagaponack, Dick and I wrestled together. I was younger, and more technically trained; he was bigger and stronger. (Few people know that Dick Seaver wrestled — probably because he was such a sweet and gentle man.)

At The Wall Street Journal Anita Elberse writes of publishers’ continued focus on blockbusters.

When a publisher spends an inordinate amount on an acquisition, it will do everything in its power to make that project a market success. Most importantly, this means supporting the book with higher-than-average marketing, advertising and distribution support — which is exactly how Grand Central handled “Dewey’”s launch. To do otherwise would be foolish: If a product like “Dewey” fails to draw readers, Grand Central knows its profitability will be severely hurt. With such high stakes and money tied up in a few big projects in the pipeline, the need to score big with a next project becomes more pressing, and the process repeats itself. The result is a spiral of ever-increasing bets on the most promising concepts, creating a “blockbuster trap.”

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich reports that publishing’s “cushy schmooze fest seems to be winding down.”

At Salon Jason Boog examines missed opportunities in book publishing.

“It’s going to be very hard for the next few years across the board in literary fiction,” says veteran agent Ira Silverberg. “A lot of good writers will be losing their editors, and loyalty is very important in this field.”

Scott Simon of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition speaks to Publishers Weekly contributing editor Charlotte Abbott about present conditions and the future of publishing.

With book sales in a general free fall, bookstores — large and small — closing around the country, and library and school budgets slashed, the publishing industry is now feeling the same pain as the rest of the economy. Small presses and university presses are not exempt from the squeeze; in the end, it comes down to income and profit, and as consumers find themselves short of cash, publishers are discovering the hard way that the fat years are over. It can’t be business as usual. The business as it has been run since Kerouac poured his novel onto a massive roll of paper stopped making financial sense long ago. Change is here to stay, even if we don’t yet know what those changes will be.

For the Washington Post, André Bernard describes the mood in the book publishing industry.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich reports layoffs and restructuring at Macmillan.

In a day of especially grim news for the book business, Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, announced a sweeping reorganization aimed at trimming costs, while Simon & Schuster laid off 35 people.

The moves signaled just how bad sales have become in bookstores and followed the news this week that the publisher of the adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the house that represents authors including Philip Roth and José Saramago, had resigned, presumably in protest of a temporary freeze on the acquisition of new books.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich describes the turmoil at large publishing houses.

Three Percent announces the twenty-five titles on its longlist.

In terms of criteria, we only considered original titles published (or released) in the U.S. in 2008. No retranslations, no reprints, no paperbacks of previously published hardcovers were eligible. And what we’re looking for is the best translated book, not just the best translation.

I was invited by Riky Stock of the German Book Office to give a presentation to GBO directors from around the world about publishing post-financial collapse. Which is a pretty big topic, and one that will probably dominate conversations post-holiday season, especially if the retail sector struggles as much as people are predicting.

At Three Percent, Chad W. Post serializes his talk.

At Slate Ron Rosenbaum sounds the new-media warning bell.

In City Pages Ben Westhoff profiles Graywolf Press.

“Writers think of it as one of the best presses in America, I know that for a fact,” [Robert] Boswell says. “As a literary writer, you’re looking for a press that’s interested in publishing the highest-quality work they can find. In theory every press is trying to do that, but in practice a lot of presses are [too] driven by the bottom line. I feel that Graywolf genuinely practices that policy.”

These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.

In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith follows two paths for the novel.

Google announces a settlement in its legal battle with representatives of the American publishing industry.

With this agreement, in-copyright, out-of-print books will now be available for readers in the U.S. to search, preview and buy online — something that was simply unavailable to date. Most of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find. They are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves, yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. Today, Google only shows snippets of text from the books where we don’t have copyright holder permission. This agreement enables people to preview up to 20% of the book.

What makes this settlement so powerful is that in addition to being able to find and preview books more easily, users will also be able to read them. And when people read them, authors and publishers of in-copyright works will be compensated. If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organizations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members. For out-of-print books that in most cases do not have a commercial market, this opens a new revenue opportunity that didn’t exist before.

At the Guardian Mark Brown notes the passing of Pat Kavanagh, wife of Julian Barnes and former agent of Martin Amis.

At a meeting on Wednesday morning with the Flemish Literary Fund, Jill Schoolman, the publisher and editor in chief of Archipelago Books, a nonprofit Brooklyn publisher of works in translation, discussed her plans to bring out “Wonder,” a novel by Hugo Claus, a Belgian writer who was frequently discussed as a Nobel contender before he died by euthanasia earlier this year.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich covers the Frankfurt Book Fair.

National Public Radio’s Day to Day laments America’s literary insularity.

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon.com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

In New York Magazine Boris Kachka writes of the end of publishing as we know it.

In her preview at Bloomberg, Laurie Muchnick asserts that it will “take a big novel to compete with the U.S. election this fall.”

Our decor is old-fashioned, timeless: bare wooden floors, lots of photographs on the walls, wooden bookshelves. The red sofa is only one stone in the mosaic at Wörtersee. It’s a thoughtfully designed bookstore that packs all our favorites into a tiny space and makes room on the walls for lots of drawings and prints by local artists.

Bookforum interviews German publisher and bookstore owner Peter Hinke.

The Guardian has a gallery of books with odd titles.

Reiji Yoshida of The Japan Times writes of the shrinking domestic publishing industry.

According to an annual survey by the Yomiuri Shimbun, 52 percent of 1,812 adult respondents said last October they did not read a book in the previous month, 14 points above the figure 20 years earlier.

The percentage of people who read one to three books a month had exceeded those who read none until the early 1990s. But the latter group has exceeded the former in number since the late 1990s, according to the survey.

The Sunday Times excerpts Kathleen Parker’s incendiary Save the Males.

. . .The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.

While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves, the better to muffle emotions that fluctuate between hilarity (are these bitches crazy or what?) and rage (yes, they are and they’ve got our kids).

Sian Pattenden at the Guardian notes Random House’s attempt to sneak an unacceptable termination clause into the contracts of writers of children’s books.

At the Guardian Alison Flood writes of the somber tone of this year’s rentrée.

At Salon Rebecca Johnson goes in search of blurbs.

The Daily Yomiuri has an article on combini novels, works of literature with manga elements added to lure readers.

You don’t have to read these books to imagine the outcome: girl meets guy; girl gets guy but first she has to discuss him endlessly with her gal friends and perhaps Mother, who is typically a dragon or an ex-supermodel or both.

It seems that even the target audience has tired of chick lit.

At the Powell’s Books blog, used book buyer Kirsten Berg writes of edges.

At The Guardian’s books blog David Barnett wonders why we have so little interest in independent writers.

At The Globe and Mail, Andrew Pyper delivers a sobering report.

The pressures on writers coming into the second decade of the quickly aging century go well beyond the previous demands of meeting deadlines and improving one’s craft. The midlist–we are soberly told by agent and editor alike–is, like the Titanic, a place no less doomed for all its comforts and good taste. Gone are the tweedy days of publishers sticking by an author because their editors believe in him. Now every book has to “work.” That is, move product. A lot.

Amazon, the online retailing giant with a fast-rising share of the consumer book market, has adopted the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands.

In the New York Times, Doreen Carvajal covers the company’s growing market presence and leverage.

Lindesay Irvine at The Guardian writes of “a very bright patch for a rarely spotlit field, with three awards for literary translations into English going to independent publishers in recent days.”

For the New York Times, Edward Wyatt collects whispers about electronic books at BookExpo America.

Booksellers, who make up the other major group attending the publishing convention, are also concerned that electronic books could become more than a passing fancy for an electronically savvy subset of customers. “It certainly does feel like a threat,” said Charles Stillwagon, the events manager at the Tattered Cover Book Store, a large independent bookseller in Denver.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, David Gura examines writers’ Web sites. The popular ones seem to be designed to appeal to those who do not read books.

If you want to understand book publishing, you need to think less Bloomsbury and more Gambino: The five big companies are like the five families. Imprints are crews with plenty of ambitious upstarts looking to make their bones. And every once in a while even a good earner has to get whacked to send a message.

New York Magazine has an article on the fall of Random House’s Peter Olson.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Karen Heller calls out publishers over their limited cover designs.

Without effort, you can find a dozen similar covers on your local bookstore’s shelves. They all blur into so much Lifetime fuzz.

These covers scream to men “Please don’t read me!” while to women they coo “Here’s more of the same!”

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches.

In The New Yorker, Eric Alterman contemplates the end of the American newspaper.

At the New York Times, Lawrence Van Gelder covers the revelation that supposed Holocaust refugee Misha Defonseca was in fact never “adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis” as she claimed in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years (follow the link just for a look at the jacket). Nor was she ever Jewish. Ah, memoir! Deep shame falls upon anyone who needed help spotting this ruse.

Also at the Times, Motoko Rich informs the innocent, gentle, fawn-like readers of memoirs that the recently published and somewhat acclaimed (by such stalwarts as Michiko Kakutani, again of the Times) Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret B. Jones, LA gangland drug runner and half-white, half-Native American hankie girl, was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, all-white princess, who perpetrated the fraud only to give voice to the voiceless. Such a brave, brave child of privilege can conjure a sniffle even in defeat, even while watching her publisher (the Riverhead Books unit of Penguin) recall all copies and cancel her book tour.

The American Booksellers Association notes Amazon’s plan to fight a New York proposal that the online retailer collect and remit sales tax for sales to in-state customers.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered profiles Twelve, publisher of Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

Publishers Weekly notes that Judith Regan and News Corp. have reached an “equitable and confidential settlement. . .with no admission of liability by any party.” What a relief!

The light of a New York Sun article catches Judith Regan as she emerges from her lair to file a lawsuit.

At the New York Times, Charles McGrath looks into the trend of publishing unedited material.

As I stated earlier, I feared that O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It would not stay down. Beaufort Books has finalized a publishing deal with the Goldman family. The plan is to leave Simpson’s ghostwritten manuscript intact but surrounded by the commentary of the Goldmans. Framing the monstrous work in this way may safely cage it.

Robert Ito at the New York Times writes about how ridiculous the book business has become:

The item up for bidding was, at first blush, unremarkable. It was an unfinished manuscript, 397 pages long, less than half of the planned book, as well as an outline detailing story arcs and plot points to come. The writer? Someone named Jordan Ainsley, whom no one had ever heard of — not readers, not book editors, certainly not anyone in Hollywood. Yet the biggest movie studios were being asked to pony up seven figures for the privilege of committing the book, sight half-unseen, to film.

And the studios promptly, and exuberantly, threw themselves into a bidding war.

The latest report of the Association of American Publishers shows a 4.3 percent increase in sales for June.

Galleycat has a post on a science fiction scam in the making.

Bookslut has an interesting article by Alexis Wiggins on the lay of the land in independent publishing after the bankruptcy of Publisher’s Group West.

“We had sold 60,000 copies of What Is the What,” explains Eli Horowitz, publisher of McSweeney’s. Because of the PGW pay system, publishers received payments for sold books every 90 days. When the bankruptcy was announced, no one knew what was to become of the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales for the previous quarter. “There were a couple months of confusion. Everyone was wondering what would happen,” Horowitz remembers. Publishers were faced with the prospect of a total loss of revenue for all fourth-quarter sales, a deathblow for many.

A blog post by Charles Stross, author of Glasshouse, explains why the future of electronic books looks no brighter than the present.

I subscribe to several periodicals. Two subscriptions I plan to allow to lapse when the time comes. Another subscription I have canceled. The content of all three publications is uneven from issue to issue but is of acceptable quality on the whole. What is not acceptable is that every week brings a few breathlessly urgent “renewal notices” or “gift subscription opportunities.” The gift subscription push has always been offensive, but renewal notices used to be acceptable because they came attached to the next to last issue and the final issue. The subscription that I canceled pushed me over the edge. I received a renewal notice and thought “Wait. Didn’t I just start this subscription?” I looked it up in my checkbook and found that I had just started the subscription. I had received a single issue. I had eleven out of twelve months to go, and I received a notice begging me not to let my subscription run out. Enough.

A Salon reader asks:

The thought of publishing the novel terrifies me. However, I do long to be published. I would not be happy just writing for the sake of writing. I want to write to be heard. It’s just that I’m afraid of being heard, as much as I want it.

. . .Have any suggestions?

Salon answers.

The Print On Demand (POD) crowd has grown (like horse shit grows mushrooms; sorry) a critic. Snideness aside, if the critic is serious and works as the lead editor of a small press as he claims, then this Web log will prove to be an interesting experiment.

Running for the Senate, you say? Who, then, is left to call out the liars of the publishing industry on the subject of sales figures?

. . .publishers routinely withhold full sales figures, saying the information is proprietary. The only people legally entitled to know those numbers are authors and their agents.

Meg Rosoff at the Guardian’s books blog writes of the difficulty in coming up with a title in the advertising age.

. . .as my wise and trustworthy editor has pointed out numerous times and at great length, Dark Ages as a title will not sell. It will not sell because it suggests darkness, gloom, unhappiness. What’s worse, it suggests history.

Gawker has a post on publications that stiff freelancers.

The publishing industry let its guard down in 2006, earning a swift pop to the proboscis, asserts a piece from National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Poets & Writers has an article about how the U. S. publishing industry is turning to China for profit.

The author of a self-published British children’s book wants the title to be removed from the Amazon UK catalog. The Guardian article says that he feels that:

“When a book gets a certain amount of attention, they will attempt to stock it and cut the independents out. Not with my book!”

HarperCollins decided to give everyone who cares about books a solstice present: sleazeball editor Judith Regan’s head on a slightly tarnished silver platter.

Enjoy the longest night of the year!

The Toronto Star has a story on vanity publishing. The author notes that there have been a few successful (not necessarily in financial terms but by more important metrics) self-published works since on-demand vanity presses began to proliferate, but the sad truth is that most of these books never should have been published at all. From later in the article:

Many other self-published titles bouncing around the Net leave one with a sinking feeling and a renewed respect for the gate-keeping function of traditional publishers.

A Forbes report on publishing asks the question, opening with the pleasing assertion that the Web’s “emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.”

The American textbook publisher will be bought by Ireland’s Riverdeep Holdings, an educational software firm that sells such well-known series as Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail.

In an article on the aftermath of the cancellation of O. J. Simpson’s book, the Associated Press (by way of the New York Times) reveals that Simpson was well aware of the tasteless nature of the work and that his only motivation for participating was grabbing some of that good “blood money” (for his children, you see).

The Globe and Mail is carrying a very grim article about the number of sales required for a book of poetry to be considered a runaway success.

Sometimes astronomers lament that the public simply cannot understand their work because the immensity of the numbers involved is difficult for the human mind to fully grasp; those who track the sales of books of poetry shuffle on in their labor gloriously free of this burden.

We all know that there are far superior (and far more interesting) measures of success for a work of art than the scale on which it moves around monetary units.

The New York Times has a story about O. J. Simpson’s forthcoming book (ghost written, no doubt), which is tentatively titled If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened. My fervent wish is that people will know better than to buy into such a calculated cash grab, but I am prepared to be disappointed on that count. The sleazy tell-all has long been a trash publishing staple. This level of crass exploitation is something new, however, and hopefully does not signal a trend.

Apparently Crown Publishers has been taken by surprise by the market success of Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.

Canada’s Globe and Mail has an article on the woes of author Nancy Huston. Her French-language novel, Lignes de faille, recently won the Prix Femina and was expected to be published in English in North America. Her publishers apparently want her to change or remove passages about George W. Bush, Jesus, and the war in Iraq. They seem to think that the passages, as they stand, might offend Americans, leading to poor sales (all they really care about, of course).

Motoko Rich’s article in The New York Times on Claire Messud’s experiences with the publishing industry and her new book, The Emperor’s Children, provides an interesting inside look at the dilemma of writers who garner praise but not sales.

A Boston Globe article reveals the lengths to which authors are forced to go to protect themselves from sales tracking algorithms.

. . .while the future is unlikely to see paper books disappear, a movement from paper to screen is nonetheless taking place rapidly in many domains. . .

Read the rest of the article at The New Republic.

The post at The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog begins with a description of recent changes at the Web sites of Penguin and HarperCollins. It ends with the truth:

Or maybe it’s a pincer movement. Some publishers–though not yet HarperCollins–have used the web to begin cutting out bookshops. You don’t need to go to a bookshop, or even onto Amazon, to pick up a Penguin. As big publishing wakes up to the potential of the web and tries to reach “customers” direct, perhaps the media are next for the chop?

The New York Times article begins with the sort of “long tail” twaddle with which we have become familiar, offering a succinct summary of why the model has not been embraced by publishers–”[they] remain wary of the long tail theory, largely because they haven’t figured out how to make money off it.”

It is well worth continuing to page two, however, for nuggets such as this one:

Some small presses build their business entirely on the long tail, bringing back into print esoteric titles that are in the public domain or had been abandoned by other publishers as unprofitable. “We’re like scavenger birds on the back of hippopotamuses,” said Edwin Frank, the editorial director of New York Review Books Classics, which was founded in 1999 and is affiliated with The New York Review of Books. Top sellers among the imprint’s 200 titles include Richard Hughes’s dreamlike novel A High Wind in Jamaica and historical novels by J. G. Farrell that revolve around Britain’s colonial rule. “We’re happy with any book that sells over 5,000 copies” during its sales life, Frank said.

When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky,” filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.

“I consistently get a very big ‘Wow!’ The printing of my photos was spectacular–I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said. “This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

Bowker, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic information, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing compiled from its Books In Print database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2005 decreased by more than 18,000 to 172,000 new titles and editions. This is the first decline in U.S. title output since 1999, and only the 10th downturn recorded in the last 50 years. It follows the record increase of more than 19,000 new books in 2004.

Great Britain, long the world’s per capita leader in the publication of new books in any language, now replaces the United States as the publisher of most new books in English. 206,000 new books were published in the U.K. in 2005, representing an increase of some 45,000 (28%) over 2004.

Read the rest of the press release at Bowker.com.

Fiction is in fashion at DKNY–and at Chanel, Saks and other high-end stores that are hosting signings by chick-lit novelists.

More and more, publishers are finding retail store partners where authors–particularly novelists who write about fashion-conscious young women–can mingle with the kinds of people who publishers think will buy their books.

Read the rest of the article at, appropriately enough, USA Today.

Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing industry’s annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of “snippets” of text, calling it a “grisly scenario.”

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

Random House, the publishing company owned by Bertelsmann, the German media giant, announced on Tuesday that it would increase the proportion of recycled paper it buys for its books to at least 30 percent by 2010, from 3 percent now.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

Reading interviews with and essays by Cory Doctorow, Eric Flint, and Tim O’Reilly over the past week got me thinking about long tail issues in publishing. I was set to write an entry on the topic when I discovered that the Grumpy Old Bookman had beaten me to the punch.

. . .it occurs to me that the book trade as a whole, may, just conceivably, be under-estimating the extent and speed of changes which may shortly be upon us.

Read the rest of the article at Grumpy Old Bookman.

It’s from last year, and the focus is on Google’s book scanning project, but the article begins with the sobering text below.

Authors struggle, mostly in vain, against their fated obscurity. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales from major booksellers, only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies.

Read the rest of the article at the New York Times.

What did we say? Direct is taking 5400. 5400 x $4.19 = $22,626. Between themselves, the other bookselling outlets are taking 20,000, and they’re all getting (to make it easy) a 60% discount, which means they’re paying $2.796 per book. 20,000 x $2.796 = $55,920.

This book starts out making us $78,546. That is the gross profit.

This book starts out making the author $14,203.68 in royalties.

Minus cost, we’ve made $28,372.32. (At the moment, we are factoring in the author’s royalties, but we are not factoring in frieght [sic], or the cost of warehousing the 9,600 books that don’t get shipped.)

Phew. Tired of math yet? Too bad, there’s more.

Read the rest of the article at ALG.

In the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, the Utopian fantasy of having a virtual printing press in every home took hold. While the surface of the idea shone with an appealingly egalitarian luster, what we had long known–that most people do not write well–again became painfully apparent. The Web was not going to usher in a golden age of plebeian poetry.

By 2000 it had become clear that the Web had become largely a conduit for commerce. Some idealism remained, and Stephen King engaged in his famous experiment, publishing The Plant in serial fashion. The installments were made available in an unencrypted format, and payment was on the honor system. King and his publisher considered the experiment a failure, and that single announcement silenced many who had been clamoring for a new paradigm in publishing. The money men woke up, took the reins, and put the wheels of the cart back in their well-worn tracks, perhaps whipping the horse a little more than was strictly necessary in the process.

Although most of the publishing industry was going through recidivism, science fiction mavericks pushed ahead, Baen Books leading the charge. The Baen rallying cry, one Cory Doctorow often repeats as a reason for making his books freely available, was:

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. [1]

Baen authors and Doctorow claim that sales have been adequate, and while I certainly find their approach to publishing intriguing, I am not convinced that it will work for literary fiction in the same way that it seems to work for science fiction. Science fiction has the “cool” factor that creates wide interest, and its readership is already accustomed to doing most of its reading from a screen.

In the early days of the Web, I created a site for some of my writing and had the horrible experience of seeing my work propagate, often uncredited or simply with someone else’s name pasted where mine went, to other sites for the gain of others. This led to my pulling back from the Web and not posting any of my writing for many years. I still get the occasional e-mail from a harried English professor whose student has ripped off a poem of mine that was only on the Web for a period of eight months almost ten years ago.

Reference

1. Flint, Eric. “Introducing the Baen Free Library.” 11 Oct. 2000 http://www.baen.com/library/>.

Resources

• Read about The Plant at Wikipedia
• Read about Creative Commons Licenses at Creative Commons
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at Alex Bosworth’s Weblog
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at PC Magazine