An E-book Positive

Something I do like about e-books is that people in other countries have easier access to read our books. People can order our books electronically through vendors by entering a random U.S. address. Even if we assign sales restrictions to only U.S. and Canada, for e-books that doesn't mean squat because the vendors can't enforce these restrictions. But I enjoy getting emails from someone in Turkey saying that they're reading our books.

More Big Ups, Grace Krilanovich!

Congrats, Grace Krilanovich. She knocked it out of the park with her first novel The Orange Eats Creeps, pretty much an instant cult classic. The book, one of the National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' selections, one of Gawker's 'most interesting fall titles', was named today one of Amazon.com's Top 10 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books for 2010.

There's also plenty more Grace on the way: Jonathan Bastian interviewed the author for 'Page by Page', Aspen Public Radio's book program; and Nylon Magazine has a photoshoot with the author running with an interview in their December/January issue.

But stepping back, to celebrate making the Amazon.com list, we're giving away 50 electronic Kindle versions of The Orange Eats Creeps for free this afternoon. Drop an email to twodollar[at]twodollarradio.com with the subject "OEC!" and we'll ping you back at some point soon with an attached .mobi file. We're only going to give copies away today (11/4), and no more than 50 copies -- so write soon.

The E-Book Hype Bubble

Christopher Mims has a great article in the Technology Review that is the most realistic and level-headed take on e-books that I've read to-date. I highly recommend checking it out.

Our Bright Future

Barnes & Noble will sell their Nook in Best Buy stores. Amazon's Kindle will be available in Target. This week, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, Barnes & Noble announced they will return to television advertising to spotlight the Nook.

Here's my pull-quote:

"Companies will have to create demand, which will take a lot of advertising," says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Put into context, Kindle sales "account for 2% of Amazon's revenue and its e-book sales account for an additional 1.5%." Once the handful of multi-national corporations who stand to profit lobby people through advertising and successfully convince them that they absolutely need these e-readers, then those percentages will rise.

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I originally wrote this piece last fall that they posted at The Rumpus. From the time our distributor made the opportunity available to us in the winter of 2008/2009, we basically dragged our heels on making our titles available electronically until this spring. Now, three of our titles are available for download as e-books (Some Things That Meant the World to Me, by Joshua Mohr; The Drop Edge of Yonder, by Rudolph Wurlitzer; I Smile Back, by Amy Koppelman).

I'm on the fence about doing more, and I'd love to hear back thoughts and opinions.

My concern -- as the e-newsletter Shelf Awareness points out -- is that "Amazon seems to be engaging in some odd pricing strategies . . . pricing some hardcover and paperback bestsellers at e-book levels." They're taking a dramatic loss selling these hardcover books that retail for $25 at this price, further elbowing out local independent bookstores while single-handedly setting an industry-wide pricing standard of $9.99. This amounts to Amazon devaluing everything that a writer or a publisher does!

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E-Doldrums

I have several messages saved permanently on my cellphone’s voicemail. Every month or so I trudge through the parade, when I’m required to re-save them. There’s a message from my wife and business cohort, Eliza, telling me that our daughter, Rio, has successfully managed to stand on her own. Another one, chronicling Rio’s first steps. Several from Rio, as some words inch out, Eliza gently prodding her along in the background.

And then there’s a stew of Two Dollar Radio-related messages. There’s one from independent publicist Lauren Cerand, saying that she saw Erotomania: A Romance, a novel by Francis Levy, in the window at City Lights. I also have saved messages from nearly every one of the authors we’ve published at Two Dollar Radio over the last two years informing me that their author-copies have arrived. They sound satisfied, and what they have to say always makes me smile.

I remember talking with Larry Shainberg, whose book Crust we published last October. I was asking Larry about Samuel Beckett, whom he was fortunate enough to meet on a handful of occasions and befriend (Larry also wrote a Pushcart-winning monograph on Beckett for The Paris Review). Larry told me that he went to see Beckett in Europe, and the pair was returning to the hotel where Beckett was staying when the desk clerk provided him with his mail, which contained the author-copies of one of his books. I don’t recall that Larry mentioned which book of Beckett’s it was, but I remember him saying that it didn’t matter whether it was your first book or your fiftieth, there’s still that feeling of intense satisfaction and joy that arrives with finally holding your book in your hands.

As a publisher, I derive a great deal of satisfaction myself when the finished book arrives. Recently, when copies of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s second and third novels, Flats and Quake, which we’re re-issuing in a back-to-back edition, came from the printer I immediately broke out my camera and took pictures. Certainly, some of the glee could be attributed to the fact that the book looked as we intended: we were nervous about the flipped/upside-down pages.

I’ve learned that publishing is a drawn-out process that above all demands patience. There is that initial burst of enthusiasm after reading a remarkable submission, then the re-kindled energy over presenting the title to the reps at sales conference, but the real flood of excitement comes upon holding the finished product in my hands. That’s when it’s real, the transition complete, when I find its spot on the bookshelf in my office: it is now a book.

As a publisher we’ve dragged our heels in embracing e-books (or even acknowledging their presence). Through our distributor, Consortium, we’re able to partake in their parent company’s program, that allows publishers to make their books available electronically rather painlessly, albeit with a modest fee. But it took us at least eight months to sign the contract, and we’re still, now, months later, resolving any further contract entanglements with authors.

Part of my reluctance is my inability to resolve in my mind the bitter truth of what we’ll be stamping our brand upon. As a publisher, I know e-books are a cheaper product – both to produce and consume (providing you can foot the tab for the e-reader) – and I’m certain that writers do too. What makes anyone believe that readers won’t arrive at this realization as well? Once the honeymoon with their sleek new gadget ends, they’ll start to demand more for their money. As a commenter to Nick Harakaway’s blog post on e-books points out: “I wouldn’t pay more than $10 for an eBook, because at more than that, I want more than I’m getting. I want a dust jacket, I want something physical. There’s an inherent belief (and I agree) e should never cost as much as its old world equivalent. You really do get less.”

Gimmicks such as Simon and Schuster’s snigger-trigger “Vook” are just the tip of the iceberg. Soon, because of the lack of page-count constraints, e-books will come complete with deleted chapters, a writer’s and editor’s cut, and alternate endings. The result will resemble more a videogame fantasia than a traditional “book.” And I don’t want to read that.

As Emily Pullen, of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, so aptly points out in a blog post: “Creating digital literature and harnessing the medium’s unique capabilities requires a specialized knowledge of programming languages. As such, it is software engineers and computer programmers (the techies) who are best suited to use this new literary medium, not the traditional Writer.”

Most likely, it will be several years and rungs on the evolutionary ladder of the Vook before even its initial potential can be imagined. In the meantime, at Two Dollar Radio we’ll casually make our books available electronically. At our size, the potential fifty dollars a month from e-book sales can make a difference. But I don’t expect many messages from authors calling to share their enthusiasm at their e-books arriving. And I won’t blame them.

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As a post-script, I'd like to mention that of the three writers I notified that their "e-book" was available, only one wrote back, (a succinct "Cool!") while the others casually disacknowledged my note. No writer spends their hours toiling by themselves in a dark room to birth an electronic book into the world.

There's this amazing preface to Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, which I'm really stoked to read (finish), where Lanier says: "The vast fanning out of fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

"And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

"The words in this book are written for people, not computers."

It's a Jungle Out There.

I wrote this piece that appeared on The Rumpus about sort of confronting e-books as a publisher. I say "sort of confronting" because my "confrontation" as well as my interaction with e-books thus far has been entirely passive, and I still don't necessarily know what to think about them.

Still, I find it remarkable that with all the hoopla and the prospect of gobbling up a new gadget, the only people (I'm counting friends and family-members, not publishing industry-friends) I know that own an e-reader are my exceptionally active and travel-prone in-laws.

Generally, I don't think that e-books are a bad thing, nor do I think that they compete with print books. In the grand scheme of things, I find myself subscribing to the school of thought laid out by the new owner of the Harvard Bookstore, Jeff Mayersohn. In a piece on the Huffington Post, after discussing the print-on-demand Espresso book machine his store recently bought, he very incisively and wisely closes by saying:

"If the physical book survives, the model of centralized production and long-haul distribution is obsolete. The corporate book hawkers are doomed and they know it - unless they can convince you that the physical book is the dinosaur and not they."

Which is a much more convincing and honest reaction than any I've heard on the e-book debate. I think it also goes quite a long way toward underlining the prospects for the future of book publishing's "three-hundred pound gorilla," Amazon.

What is the future of Amazon? As the print-on-demand Espresso book machine circulates and becomes more accessible, it seems that if Amazon doesn't offer an option where shoppers can pick up their orders the same day as their order is placed then they will become obsolete. (Which itself is a silly thought, bringing us back to where we started, shopping from our neighbor's store.)

To me, it appears as though by offering e-books Amazon has begun re-branding themselves as a tech company rather than a retailer. By setting the standard cost of e-books at $9.99, they've also devalued their base product considerably.

I'd say Amazon's future is pretty bleak, and they have to know it, which is why they're placing such a bloated emphasis on e-books.

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I didn't set out to write all this.

My point was to say that beginning in April, we will begin making a couple of our titles available as e-books: Some Things That Meant the World to Me, by Joshua Mohr; The Drop Edge of Yonder, by Rudolph Wurlitzer; and I Smile Back, by Amy Koppelman.

He Was the Man For His Time and Place.

I wrote a rather nostalgic piece on The Rumpus cataloging my lethargy towards e-books. In it, I mention Larry Shainberg (author of Crust) telling me a story about being with Samuel Beckett when he received his author-copies of one of his books. As I was writing the piece, I asked Larry to tell me the story again and this is what he wrote:

"I've forgotten which of Beckett's books I told you about. It was one he published when about 78 years old. After a cast party for the London production of Endgame (the one I wrote about, for which he invited me to watch rehearsals), I walked him -- across Hyde Park -- back to his hotel because he was a bit drunk and I was worried to see he'd make it. At the front desk, they presented him with a hand-delivered copy, the first he'd seen, and as we rode up in the elevator together (I wasn't about to leave him before he got to his room), he showed off the book to me as if it were his first... "'What do you think? Nice cover, isn't it?'"

"His enthusiasm, I should say, was in no way unusual. In general, he always seemed like a beginner in his work."

Making the Case for Technology: A Younger Generation’s Perspective on the Present Publishing Predicament

by JK Evanczuk

One of the most fascinating things about the technological revolution sweeping over the publishing industry is not the products of the revolution itself—that is, digital readers, hybrid books, and the evolution of the Internet—but rather all the speculation that all this new technology has inspired. I don’t think there’s ever been a revolution before with so much real-time commentary.

I can’t count how many articles I’ve read decrying technology—online articles, mind you, and let’s not ignore the irony inherent in that. People aren’t reading anymore, they say. They’re too busy playing digital Scrabble or Tweeting about what they ate for breakfast. It’s the end for the publishing industry! We’re doomed! And all the doomsaying is to be expected, of course, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned during this technological revolution, it’s that People Don’t Like Change. Furthermore, people are reacting to incomplete information, and making wild conjecture based on a digital-literary climate that hasn’t been seen through yet.

That said, let me make some wild conjecture of my own.

The way I see it, technology is a wonderful, wonderful thing for literature. Thanks to the Internet we can discover new books and publishers and discuss our favorite stories with interesting people outside our own literary circles, whom we’ve perhaps never met in person. Thanks to the Kindle and the iPhone we can take our favorite books with us—we can take entire libraries with us—and even download new novels on-the-go. Technology makes it exceedingly easy to discover and enjoy literature.

I understand why technology is causing such a mighty ruckus right now—why mess around with something so ancient and sacred as the printed word?—but I think what all the hubbub ultimately comes down to is this: are people still reading? And they are, more than ever before. Emerging technological formats and shifting consumer preferences are forcing publishers to restructure their operations accordingly, but that’s all it is. Restructuring. Which is markedly different than “the end of publishing.”

Like the music and movie industries are currently re-examining their operations in the face of new formats and digital piracy, the publishing industry will have to take a good hard look at itself and figure out how to make itself sustainable, whether that’s by charging higher prices for e-books or with less conventional methods, such as including advertisements in their books or turning their authors into rock stars and charging fans steep prices to see them on tour, stadium-style.

These ideas might seem a little outlandish, sure. But then again, maybe that’s what we need, because the old methods aren’t working anymore. The publishing industry isn’t what it used to be. But I don’t think that’s anything to worry about, in the long-term anyway. Things change. That’s the way of the world. The only difference about what’s happening now is that the change in question is big and abrupt, and because of that People Don’t Like It.

While I’m just beginning the heyday of my own generation and therefore cannot personally attest to the struggles of the publishing industry during earlier generations, as far as I can tell literature has always had to contend with The Next Big Thing. First it was the radio, then the film, then television. Now it’s technology, manifest in a medley of forms. But literature prevailed then. It will prevail now.

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JK Evanczuk is the founter of LitDrift, a blog about storytelling in the 21st century.

Uniquely Calibrated Cultural Noise Filters

By Emily Pullen

After a somewhat frustrating week where it seemed like computers and databases and websites were crashing at every turn, it was refreshing to open a book and have it still work. There is something to be said for a technology that has been pretty reliable for the last 500 years or so. (RIP 8-track players and virtual reality.)


But it also got me thinking about the relationship between art and technology, and how there seems to be a certain proto-phase of development where the vision for the art is there, but the technology is still being honed by scientists. I'd like to look back, way back, to photography as an example, and then forward to digital as a literary medium.

In the early 19th century, polymaths who wanted to use technology to improve their art (like Louis Daguerre) partnered with inventors and chemists to attempt to create lasting photographic images. Fine artists probably thought the scientific tinkering was more akin to alchemy than art, and it took several decades for the technology to develop into something easily utilized by artists. Even today, photography hasn't lost its technical roots -- after framing the shot and clicking the shutter, you still have to develop the film properly, expose the paper to the right amount of light, and chemically develop the photograph itself: art and technology swirling together. Digital photography offers the same swirling, but the chemicals have been swapped for pixels, and now pretty much anyone can do it.Just as chemists and inventors developed the technology that allowed photography to become an art, programmers and tech geeks are developing the technology that will allow digital to evolve from a format to a literary medium. When treating digital as a format, programmers simply take the text a writer has created and make it available digitally -- almost like translating the text. However, creating digital literature and harnessing the medium's unique capabilities requires a specialized knowledge of programming languages. As such, it is software engineers and computer programmers (the techies) who are best suited to use this new literary medium, not the traditional Writer. The only area where digital technology seems to be democratizing literature is in print-on-demand self-publishing (which I'm not yet convinced is a positive development). And this is still very much on the level of format, not medium. In a perfect world, developers will continue to hone the technology, the public will continue to gain knowledge, and they will eventually meet somewhere in the middle.

I think what the photography analogy suggests, more than anything else, is that we may be expecting too much too soon, digitally. In New Media Poetics (due in paperback from MIT Press in October 2009), the editor Adalaide Morris brings up an interesting visionary from the early years of the 20th century: Gertrude Stein. Morris writes, "For Stein, we are, each and every one of us, nimble citizens of an always newly technologized, mediated world that hasn't yet entered, much less altered, our categories of thought" (Morris 2). Now, as then, we're living IN the technology even as we're developing the categories and language to conceptualize its significance. Merriam-Webster added the phrase "personal computer" to their dictionary in 1976. "E-mail" in 1982, "internet" in 1985, "e-book" in 1988 (surprisingly), "blog" in 1999, and "google" as a verb in 2001. We're talking IN MY LIFETIME, people, and we all know how quick Merriam-Webster is to allow new words into its fold.
A huge difference, however, between this new century and the last, is the exponentially growing beast called consumer culture. We've been conditioned to expect huge speed, both in the development of technologies and in their dissemination over the last few decades. At the LA Festival of Books in April, Richard Nash asserted that publishers perfected the art of supply in the 20th century, but to survive the transition to the 21st, they will have to turn their attention to consumer demand. More specifically, I think he's suggesting that large publishers try to learn something from the scrappy way independent presses and bookstores have been surviving for decades: by acting as cultural noise filters that are uniquely calibrated to what their readers want. In a lot of ways, I believe the public is ready to consume digital literature. But the technology is still, quite obviously, developing. If fact, as publishers strive to fulfill consumers' growing desire to read digitally, they may complicate things by trying to get it done themselves rather than encouraging broader, more unified development of the technology itself. That's why we have so many formats and so many devices, and none of them can do as much as we imagine they should.

In an artistic time continuum that, in the past, went from technological development to creative production to public appreciation, where will consumer demand figure in? And is digital technology ready to become a popular literary medium (rather than an experimental one)?

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EMILY PULLEN grew up, went to college, and cultivated her love for books and corn in Iowa. She discovered her love of bookstores in Boston, and currently works at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. She believes strongly in the symbiotic relationship between indie bookstores and indie publishers, and one day she hopes to be involved in some sort of hybrid of the two. She is also currently serving on the Bookseller Advisory Council of the ABA and the Emerging Leaders Council of young booksellers. Her favorite authors include William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Jeanette Winterson.