Category Archives: E-books

Testimonial to the curious state of commercial publishing: literary young Lochinvars locked out despite high praise from gatekeepers

. Artists writers and money, Cooperatives, E-books, Micropayments, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . , , , , , ,

John A. A. Logan poised to evoke the touch of evil in The Survival of Thomas Ford – and below, less alarmingly, with his mother, Agnes Logan
Photographs by Alasdair Allen (above) and northern-times.co.uk

…

‘We sly women are the world’s only hope,’ said Jan, ‘And not just any old sly women either. You can forget about yer Jews and Protestants for starters. And of course any woman who dabbles in atheism.’

‘You get them, man,’ said Bathsheba. ‘It happens.’

[…]

‘Still in deep denial about the Counter-Reformation, yer Prods.’ Bathsheba beeped the horn again. ‘The most comically perplexed souls of all time, poor things.’ Beebeep. ‘The ne plus ultra of human… Of human whit? Thingummibob. Whit’s the word? Cartoonishness? Am I toasty warm? Get us the thesaurus.’

Jan found it in the glove compartment and gave it over.

The Adorata, Sean Murray

…

What is the point of thrillers – the noir kind, especially?

Er, … entertainment, do you suppose? you suggest drily, stifling a sardonic ‘D’oh!’

To which post-Gutenberg’s answer would be, but what is the point of this sub-genre of entertainment?

Yes, yes … we know, an absurdly ambitious question for a funny little blog.

But this hardly rules out suggesting a line of enquiry for an answer: might the point of blood-and-gore electrified by crackling suspense be to fight horror with horror? That is, neutralise real-life horror, shock and sadness, with the imagined and invented kind? Nothing supplies temporary relief for the agony of witnessing the suffering of someone beloved in extremis – helpless to do much to relieve it – as well as a story so powerful that it takes control of your brain and entire nervous system, whether read in snatches or all the way through.

Events of recent weeks have shown us that a well-written thriller violent and gripping in direct proportion to the unbearable, in actual life, works better than any other literary form – particularly for a reader who loathes violent films and literature, and often resents the manipulations of narrative suspense.

The book is set aside, and the reader feels inexplicably stronger and ready to face down the monsters again. Some process less akin to catharsis than to Freud’s idea of displacement is surely at work – which, in a Wikipedia definition,

operates in the mind unconsciously and involves emotions, ideas or wishes being transferred from their original object to a more acceptable substitute. It is most often used to allay anxiety …

The book – or rather, e-book — that worked this strange magic for us is The Survival of Thomas Ford, about which we learnt from a Twitter link by its author, John A. A. Logan, to a detailed history of the manuscript’s long string of rejections that we would call staggeringly unbelievable and absurd if we did not know it to be an impeccably accurate record of the state of conventional publishing in 2012. We began to watch John’s tweet stream after we found ourselves on the same side in an online debate about copyright in the age of the net; among the not-terribly-popular lobbyists for paying artists and writers for work in the age of e-pirating.

Soon, we were reading arresting sentences and sequences like these:

 Jimmy sipped Coke and watched Robert out of an eye’s sly edge.

…

 Robert believed that it was sometimes possible for the universe to overlook certain misdeeds, even serious ones. He had believed from an early age that the universe made errors, usually errors of omission. He believed, in fact, that Jimmy’s very existence was evidence of such an error.

  If Jimmy was a vacuum, then Robert had been sucked in.

We registered something indefinably Scottish in the observations, the styles of expression, and marvelled at the absence of the too-familiar props in mass-market thriller-writing – glamourising brand names and settings – and clichéd ‘middle-class’ attitudes to people on less fortunate social rungs, or the reverse. A hospital cleaner, finding herself for the first time in an urban garden thinks,

This garden was like a machine for escaping the city.

After weeks of reading in tiny sips, for a lack of time, we reached a scene in which a father punishes his adult son for mistreating immigrant Polish bricklayers by flinging him into the mud with a feral twist that all but breaks his neck. Soon, there are characters bleeding from kitchen knives stuck in their sides and … For fear of the spoiler effect, we’ll stop there and say that we usually go to extremes to avoid sustained violence in any form, and were able to endure no more than a half-hour of The Silence of the Lambs. But we could not stop reading Survival.

John Logan is certainly not trying to be Muriel Spark, the grand priestess of modern Scottish literature, but as real life trouble intensified and spun out of control for us, we grew increasingly impatient with audio recordings of still gritty but tired recent books by Ian Rankin to which we had turned – because they were sitting on our library re-shelving cart – to make sure that we stayed fully alert on long driving expeditions on featureless roads. We longed to listen instead to the fresher writing voice and inspiration of the next chapter of the Logan thriller with its endlessly surprising perspectives and frequently excellent prose.

That last attribute is something John’s work has in common with other young Scots writers, too many of them unpublished, or self-published and unnoticed because of hair-raisingly nonsensical sagas of rejection – like his. The extract from a modernist — Barthian, Bellowish, (William) Burroughsian – novel by Sean Murray in the epigraph for this post came from a discussion of misogyny in the work of male novelists on Donkeyshott and Xuitlacoche, the domain of a blogger, Philip Hall, who has a head crammed with stimulating, cosmopolitan ideas. The guest-post on his blog spotlighting the Adorata remarked, ‘If your life depended on it, could you imagine Mailer creating a female character with a thesaurus stored in her car?’

In disembodied cyberspace, post-Gutenberg has had more than one encounter with these Scottish scribes — whose energy and dauntlessness recall ‘O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west/Through all the wide Border his steed was the best …’. We have been honoured by bracing and uplifting encouragement from them – which might make our motives for writing this post suspect. Fear not. We have … ahem … credibility to protect, as obscure as we are, in this patch of the net.

Before we leave you to read a clip from John’s account of his well-deserved — but hard-won — success with publishing Survival as an e-book, we have a question. Can we — those of us who care about the absurdity of neither John nor Sean Murray finding a conventional publisher with conventional marketing muscle — do something to finance the efforts of writers suffering from the disappearance of editors capable of nurturing unpublished writers? Or sustaining the efforts of those who already have stellar publishing credits, but have run afoul of the salespeople promoted to über-gatekeepers at some of the most famous literary imprints?

We have made suggestions before, about how this might be done – using micropayments, something better than Kickstarter and a new way of organising publishing as a massively inclusive, subscriber-based ‘co-owned’ medium.

That post-Gutenberg — thousands of miles from Scotland, with no real-life acquaintance with any of these scarcely-known Scottish scribblers — should care so much about helping them find support surely means that something can be done, and soon.

Over, now, to John himself – although you will want to read his entire record of the death of common sense. The last page of Survival says that John has been published by Picador, Vintage and Chapman – all in the loftiest tier of the serious end of the book business.

… In December 2010, the literary agent phoned me for 90 minutes, to tell me he was sure a major publishing house’s editors had wanted to take my book, but then at the meeting with the sales dept the sales folk for this publishing house had said that I “reminded them of someone they had had high hopes for two years earlier but then had lost money on”. And that ended that house’s interest in the book.

A little later, the senior commissioning editor at another major UK publishing house wrote to say “I think John Logan is a hugely talented writer. I love books like this that have the pace and excitement of a thriller but the voice and emotional depth of a literary novel”. But again when it came right down to it, no sale!

Then my agent passed the book to a film consultant who worked with him. She told him my novel, The Survival of Thomas Ford, was the best book she had read in that literary agency in the last 4 years. This was taken very seriously, as this film consultant had discovered Slumdog Millionaire as an unpublished manuscript and was responsible for it getting developed into a film …

A poetic boatload of words and a foretaste of e-publishing as bringer of light and joy

. E-books, Poetry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . , , , , , ,

Cover drawing by Sascha Juritz
What matters most is what you make
Roy Eales
Blackbird Editions, Pawel Pan Presse, 2004

Sit up and pay attention, all you change-resistant bookworms who see no good in e-publishing; nothing but the prospect of avaricious conventional publishers charging readers more than once for the same text repackaged in different media – and witless self-publishing writers drowning us in e-drivel.

This week, post-Gutenberg offers word nerds everywhere an example of the littérature-sans-frontières that the net could – will – soon give us as a matter of course. Undeniably, no e-book could replicate the pleasure of handling the slender volume printed on luscious, textured paper from which our extract comes. Never mind, read on. See proof in many dimensions of how the net could – conceivably — help to save literary culture.

These poetic, fanciful lines with something critical to tell us about real life are introduced by their writer, Roy Eales. In his book What matters most is what you make (2004), they appear translated into Breton – the language of the French province of Brittany – as well as in French and German, alongside the English original. (Only the second translation is reproduced here, but we hope to find time to transcribe the other two.)

Roy is a fine, original, unpredictable and unclassifiable English writer and poet living in Brittany who was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by official France in 2004. He is that rare scribe not born a ‘digital native’ who has leapt from print-only to blending literature with other art in readings of his work interwoven with musical performances by members of his group. A selection of his poems in five languages has been recorded on a CD, ‘Just in Case’ by Roy Eales and his friends (2010), with original music by artists in Brittany and Wales.

Beneath Boatload, on this page, is another excerpt from the same book– the first verse of a wicked, delicious, posthumous tribute to Sascha Juritz, the artist and friend whose drawings accompany Roy’s poems, prose meditations and vignettes.

                                                 

.

.

A note from Roy Eales:

.

A boatload of words came to me in the middle of a night sometime in late 2003. Legend, mythology, mystery abound in Brittany, Bretons and their literature, and I searched for something satirical in which I could use these elements to castigate the French, heavily, for their stern, backward attitude towards other languages in their national space, and to challenge the Bretons, lightly, for not fighting back enough.

[ from the book’s introduction: ]

Boatload and the other poems in this book were dedicated to Sascha Juritz, brilliant artist, my friend and publisher of this and other books over the years. He died in 2003 as this book with his exquisite drawings was being published. He saw Brittany as a twin for Lausitz, his own Slav country locked into the Czech and Polish borders and colonized by Germany some centuries ago as independent Brittany was by the French. Like the Bretons, the people of Lausitz have sought to protect their culture and language despite the inevitable forces to conform to the ‘master’ French and German cultures and languages. 

.

[ If you are reading this on the blog’s ‘front page,’ please click on the title of this post to be taken to its own separate part of the site to read the following words set out as they are meant to be. WordPress’s automated layout software tends to destroy certain types of special formatting, such as spacing for poetry. ]

.

A boatload of words: a fable for Brittany

.

At an old port in Brittany a man wearing a peaked black cap was

leaning on his right leg staring capital in the face.

.

He turned his head and swivelled on his left leg to an alternative

position, and rested there on his right leg again.

.

He lit his pipe and told a tale. This is what happened.

.

One cold winter morning at the same port a black seabird

perched on his shoulder and told him in Breton that a huge boat

heaving off Brittany on a strong Atlantic sea had been wrecked

by a mutiny – of its cargo – a boatload of words, in fact, the entire

vocabulary.

.

The black bird twittered, in revealing that the words were to be

dumped at sea, three miles out, in black stranglehold sacks stamped in

red: SUPERFLUOUS, by order of the Ministry of Absolute Control.

.

Naturally, the words didn’t like this. They had been beaten before,

but never, so overtly, threatened with extinction.

.

In a mighty speech, Gwendal, their leader calls for a rebellion, and

draws up a plan. The cleverest words would free everyone, and the

heaviest words would sink the boat. Then all the words would float

back to their homeland.

.

Seabirds flying over the boat learnt secretly of the plan from the words,

who asked them to speed messages in Breton back to the people.

.

So the news spread quickly across Brittany, and soon all the shoreland

bristled full of music and people, dancing and singing, facing the sea

and the sinking ship on the horizon.

.

And coming towards them a sheet of white foam on the sea, a foam of

words, as the entire language was carried proudly ashore by the waves

like a hero.

.

From that day on the people vowed never again would they leave their

language alone to save itself from any perils at sea, or wherever they

may be.

.

Roy Eales, 2003 

.

. 

Une cargaison de mots: fable pour la Bretagne

 

Sur un vieux port breton, un homme portant une casquette de marin

noire s’appuyait sur sa jambe droite, fixant du regard un point d’une

importance capitale.

.

It tourna la tête et pivota sa jambe gauche pour changer de position

et se tint là de nouveau sur sa jambe droite. It alluma sa pipe et raconta

une histoire. Voici ce qui s’était passé.

.

Un froid matin d’hiver sur ce même port un oiseau marin se percha

sur son épaule et lui raconta en Breton qu’un énorme navire se soulevant

au large de la Bretagne sur une forte mer atlantique avait fait naufrage à

cause d’une mutinerie – de sa cargaison – une cargaison de mots, en

fait tout le vocabulaire de la langue du pays.

.

L’oiseau noir gazouillait, alors qu’il révélait que les mots devaient être

jetés à la mer à trois miles au large, étranglés dans les sacs noirs sur

lesquels était tamponné en rouge: SUPERFLU, sur ordre du Ministère

du Contrôle Absolu.

.

Naturellement, les mots ne furent pas contents. Ils avaient déjà été

battus, mais jamais, si ouvertement, menacés d’extinction.

.

Dans un vibrant discours, Gwendal, leur chef appelle à la rébellion

et établit un plan. Les mots les plus habiles libéreraient tout le monde,

et les plus lourds couleraient le navire. Puis tous reviendraient en

flottant jusqu’à leur terre.

.

Des oiseaux marins volant au-dessus du navire furent en secret mis au

courant du plan des mots, qui leur demandèrent de faire rapidement

passer un message en breton au peuple.

.

Ainsi les nouvelles se répandirent vite à travers le pays, et bientôt

tout le littoral grouillait, repli de musique et de gens qui dansaient

et chantaient, face à la mer et un bateau coulant à l’horizon.

.

Et venant vers eux, drap d’écume blanche sur la mer, une écume de

mots, toute la langue du pays, était portée fièrement au rivage par les

vagues, comme un héros.

.

Depuis ce jour le peuple fit serment de ne jamais plus laisser sa langue

toute seule faire face aux périls en mer, ou n’importe où ailleurs.

.

Roy Eales, 2003

[ Translated into French by Nanda Troadeg and Susan Eales ]

.

And here is a snippet of Roy’s tribute to Sascha Juritz, ‘Don’t Overdrive, my dear‘ … you can read the rest in your own copy of What matters most is what you make:

.

This time

Is there only the reality?

.  So don’t overdrive, my dear.

Where this genius is concerned

reality is irrationality.

The black lines

send off the normality

and poetry is just

.  a little shit

after which you feel better

and lose a bit of yourself.

.  It doesn’t matter, my dear.

.  They hear nothing

.  Say nothing

.  See nothing — scheisser — .

But every man is always

.  a Grand Poète,

has something to say,

. a small bird in the head.

.

[ … continues … ]

.

.

Gatekeepers I: in defence of Rachel Cusk — let cross-cultural flowers bloom in simultaneous international e-publishing

. E-books, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . , , , , , ,

‘Brobdingnag o Lilliput’: the net has room for radically opposed perspectives and taste
in art and literature (see nearly invisible figures at base of shop windows).
Photograph by MIL22

Readers, all three of you, know that this blog could be one of the greatest fans Private Eye** has ever had – not just for its satire in direct descent from Jonathan Swift and other upholders of the grotesque tradition in English literature; not only for its unique compendium of whistleblowing about misused power and authority in Britain published every fortnight, but also for the futuristic modus operandi that makes these offerings possible.

This means that it is with excruciating reluctance that we at post-Gutenberg ask why the Eye keeps savaging the novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk, who is capable of dystopian flights of prose of this calibre —

Summer came, clanging days of glaring sunshine in the seaside town where I live, the gulls screaming in the early dawn, a glittering agitation everywhere, the water a vista of smashed light. I could no longer sleep; my consciousness filled up with the lumber of dreams, of broken-edged sections of the past heaving and stirring in the undertow.

It reminded us of …

She listened … there was only the sound of the sea. … She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her … but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotized, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea …

… lines by another good writer, about whom we’ll have a bit more to say in a moment.

The first passage is an extract from Cusk’s Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published this spring by Faber and Faber, today’s most prestigious literary imprint in Britain. With such a backer, she certainly did well with the gatekeepers in the sense in which the term is being used now – to refer to the old print media mafia of literary agents and editors deciding whose manuscripts will be lifted out of the slough of rejection, then promoted energetically, or left there to rot.

‘Gatekeeper’ could reasonably be used more widely, to include the reading public of a particular place either giving scribblers permission to think, feel and write in the ways that come most naturally to them – or attacking them or otherwise discouraging them from doing so.

That sanction has so far largely been denied to Rachel Cusk in Britain – for her divorce memoir. The Eye is far from her only excoriating mocker. Other British newspapers and innumerable citizen-commenters on reviews and articles about her have lambasted her eidetic, intelligent and ferociously self-critical account of this sad passage in her life. She has been denounced for solipsism, wallowing in dark emotions and imagery, and wrecking her own family’s privacy. For any objective witness to this battering – watching a long way from literary London – the last criticism is the most puzzling. Not once does she name her ex-husband or make it possible to identify him by his occupation, which has anyway changed since their divorce. Nor are her children easily identifiable, since they have no Christian names in her story, and presumably the surname of their father.

Yes, some of these facts can indeed be discovered online, but not by her choice – only, you suspect, because of the snippets of real life information extracted from her in publicity interviews on which book publishers insist, brooking no compromise.

You wonder why the anger about the baseless accusations of privacy invasion are never directed at ‘luvvie’ newspaper columnists, bloggers and social media networkers who never have to open the kimono, apparently delighted to live with it flapping high above their heads in a permanent hurricane of disclosure about themselves and their near and dear.

Cusk’s actual mistake was in violating the unwritten and unspoken rule for English writing in England – one that tends to make Americans uncomfortable. It decrees that sustained introspection and emotional intensity – when tending to chiaroscuro, if not outright melancholy – must be undercut by wit, poking fun at oneself, or some form of outrageousness like the scatological riffs and downright nastiness in some of Philip Larkin’s poetry. Admitting to admiring the lyrics of Leonard Cohen is asking to be sent to an aesthetic Siberia in most social circles. That makes no difference to those of us who marvel at the way sounds marry words in his contributions to music – even if we do believe the world’s greatest literary tradition to be English, inevitably: it shaped our taste.

But that is not the same as thinking that English aesthetic preferences should be used as a universal yardstick.

North America has crept into this scrap of wondering because Cusk’s writing style has partly been shaped by the years she spent there as a child. Her Mood Indigo prose in this memoir – I look forward to reading the others, and her novels – is strongly reminiscent of Joan Didion’s.

If Aftermath had been published simultaneously as an e-book in Britain and America – instead of in the UK alone – she would surely have elicited a more sympathetic or certainly, balanced, reaction from a cross-cultural audience. 

As sharp-eyed lit-critters have already guessed, the writer of the second extract quoted in this post is none other than Virginia Woolf – in To the Lighthouse. Much of her oeuvre consists of narcissistic, depressive, long-drawn-out exercises in introspection. Yet expert and non-expert British readers grant her genius status. Does a female writer have to be a victim of incest, and mentally ill, and finally, a suicide, to be allowed to say what she wants to as she sees most fit?

In a special editorial, no less, about Cusk, not long after Aftermath was published, The Guardian asked whether children can ‘really be counted as acceptable collateral damage in the self-styled vocation of the artist’ — without a substantiating word or phrase for the accusation. … Well! Should literary critics include in evaluations of the works of Virginia Woolf the question of whether it was right or fair that Leonard Woolf should have been obliged to interrupt his literary career, chronically, to serve as his wife’s psychiatric nurse? A nonsensical question, yes, but no more so than the one about damaging children.

The Guardian feels justified in lashing poor Rachel Cusk for writing a book that ‘plunges headfirst into the phenomenology of pain, which she wraps in a beautifying prose.’ Note the use of beautifying rather than beautiful – the compliment her sentences amply deserve – hinting that her writing so well must be reckoned another crime against decency; lipstick on a pig.

Time and the net will, we suspect, deliver the respect she deserves – for giving us, for instance:

We too came by car, along the motorway and then on smaller roads that took us through countryside and villages, little redbrick places that reminded me of the village where I used to visit my grandmother as a child. We lived in America then, and that English village, so damp and miniature-seeming, so full of twists and turns and cavities, constituted my education in the country of my parents, where soon I would come to live for good. In California I wasn’t quite sure who I was: large pieces of the jigsaw were missing, and it seemed that the missing pieces were here, in this rain-darkened place. I half-recognised them, the antiquity and the expressive weather, the hedgerows with their mysterious convoluted interiors, the sense of a solid provenance that underlay the surface movements of life like wood beneath the burnish: they were part of me and yet they lay outside me. … I was an onlooker, though I didn’t want to be. I wanted to live in the moment instead of always being lifted out of it into awareness, like a child lifted out of its warm bed half-asleep in the thick of night.

Brava! Rachel Cusk. Carry on scribbling, don’t let the Mini-Englander mentality get you down and in future, insist on simultaneous international publication.

——————-

** Feeling a bit low?  antidote: ‘Never too old’, a new love story by Dame Silvie Krin …

Is Amazon a bully, beating publishers into submission? Dear writers: some publishers were aiming for totalitarian rule of the book business

. 4th Estate moves, E-books, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . , , , , , ,

Not many writers visit the book fair. ‘It’d be like bringing a cow for a stroll around a meat market,’ said one editor.

— report on the London Book Fair by Patrick Barkham, 18 April 2012

[ the date is what matters most, here: ]… Publishing is moving towards a crisis. One should expect to see a number of respected publishing houses quietly exit the scene.  […]  Authors’ incomes are low for an embarrassingly simple reason: publishers do not sell enough copies of their books. […] For every copy of a hardcover book sold at its normal retail price, one book is sold as a remainder – a book that goes from the publisher to the remainder dealer for less than the cost of producing it and with zero income to the author. No other industry can make this claim.

— Leonard Shatzkin, In Cold Type: Overcoming the Book Crisis, 1982

Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant that something new was being born.

— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, 2011

Writers are deeply confused by e-publishing and its implications. They are mistaking friends for enemies, and embracing their most shameless exploiters – for centuries – like Little Red Riding Hood hugging the beast tricked out as her granny.

I read with eyes popping in disbelief a veteran publisher, Dan Cafaro, advising young writers to ‘mentally prepare to endure as a starving artist.’ He said that last October. Then, referring to the digital revolution, he suggested that they ‘carve out a patchwork career in the creative arts by complying with the behaviours of this new paradigm of publishing’.

How could he have come by the wisdom in his second pronouncement without understanding that the ‘paradigm’ taking shape represents the best chance that has come along – ever – to change the meek acceptance of hunger and suffering as inevitably the lot of scribes? … Yes, thank you, I have read my history. I know that this has been thoroughly conventional wisdom for a long time. But why not consider that for aeons, everywhere, the wisest heads once saw the fates of kulaks, their poorer fellow-peasants, and Hindu caste untouchables, as equally immutable – until these social doormats seized their chance for rebellion?

I would like writers who care about being able to make a reasonable living some day to get just two things right: (i) Amazon is their true friend, as this blog has explained before, and not members of the old print club, like the five publishers fined by the U.S. justice department on the 11th — with Apple — for collusive price-fixing.  (ii) Far from gobbling up book publishing on every continent and turning everyone else in the business into a forelock-tugging serf, the giant retailer could just let us rewrite the sad story of writers and their wages into a far happier narrative.

Scott Turow, the president of the American Authors’ Guild, is simply wrong to say that the antitrust suit risks ‘killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.’

Consider these arguments by one of the few voices of sanity in the hullabaloo over Amazon’s well-deserved victory over the price-fixers. What Eduardo Porter said in his ‘Economic Scene’ column in the New York Times last week is not merely true. It correctly puts the welfare of writers — the workers without whom there would be neither books nor e-texts — at the centre of the picture.

To believe publishers and authors, the government just handed Amazon a monopoly over the book market: The price-fixing suit against Apple and the nation’s top publishers […] will free Amazon to offer ruinous discounts in the booming new market of electronic books, drive brick-and-mortar bookstores out of existence and kill off publishers’ lucrative business of ink on paper.

[…]

Yet there is a different reading to this story. Publishing companies — like bookstores — fear they are on the losing end of a technological whirlwind of digital distribution that will make much of what they do obsolete. They would like to stop it. But though publishers may be happy to subvert competition to protect their business, this can entail a heavy cost for the rest of society.

Why have none of the hysterical media commentators Porter contradicted in his analysis – for instance, David Carr, writing for the same newspaper – met a journalist’s obligation to state the whole truth, which is that Amazon’s share of e-book sales has fallen dramatically over the last two years? As Porter says,

While Amazon remains dominant, its share of the e-book market has fallen to about 60 percent from 90 percent.

Carr dug out a law professor in New York to say, for his column: ‘It is not clear that lower prices are necessarily in the long-term interests of the public at large.’ He found a New York lawyer for a gloomy summing-up: ‘The book business is both hermetic and dwindling. There is not a drop of new capital coming into this business … The margins are low and there is almost no growth …’.

The only trouble with orchestrating this condemnation of Amazon is that the same mournful dirge was being played for book publishers thirty years ago. Then, there were no e-books or gigantic e-booksellers. E-publishing existed exclusively in the misty visions of futurists.

In In Cold Type: Overcoming the Book Crisis, Leonard Shatzkin, a respected senior executive in the New York book business, wrote three decades ago:

There is no longer very much doubt that trade book publishing is suffering from more than its share of our present economic malaise … The immediate future for … book publishing in general is bleak …’. [his ital.]

A number-cruncher at heart, Shatzkin diagnosed poor sales forecasting and inefficient stocking and inventory management as the chief cause of book business woes. He dreamt up complex mathematical formulae for calculating the ideal size of a publisher’s sales force, and techniques of regression analysis for projecting book sales.

Though it is clear throughout his book that he was a civilised man who cared about readers, sound editorial policies, and publishing’s ‘contribution to the health of our democratic culture’, only one of his sixteen chapters was devoted to writers: ‘Don’t Forget the Author’. Who does his book treat as the lead characters in the business? Publishers, book distributors, and booksellers.

Encapsulating his recommendations for curing publishing of its ills, he advocated precisely the reverse of what actually happened after Amazon entered the scene about ten years later – that publishers aim at complete control of the book business by wresting power from book distributors:

It does not seem too far-fetched to suggest that some of the larger publishers will some day make publisher control of inventory a condition for doing business with a book retailer. […] The introduction of rational, publisher-controlled and publisher-responsible distribution implies other desirable consequences. […] Distribution controlled by the publisher will reduce the shameful waste resulting from the present need to guess how many copies will be needed on publication day …

And what was the happiest result he foresaw? It is hair-raisingly ironic for anyone listening to the raving by Amazon’s critics about the steady decline in book prices that it has brought about:

The reduction in production waste and in the waste of handling and processing of returns […] and all the activities concerned with distribution, should lead to a reduction in the retail price of books. Even at half their present levels, book prices will give publishers much greater margins than they now enjoy.

Ahem.

So, was Leonard Shatzkin – who died ten years ago — a lone, batty eccentric, mostly ignored by his cohorts when he wrote his book? Very much to the contrary, In Cold Type’s publisher, Boston-based Houghton-Mifflin – one of the most blue-blooded imprints in the U.S. – inserted an extraordinary note into the copyright page, which read in part:

It is not often that Houghton Mifflin adds a statement to a book it has published …[W]hen a publisher presents a book containing strong opinions about … American trade publishing, it may be thought that such a book represents, in some measure the philosophy of the publisher as well as that of the author.

Instead of publishers devouring the book chain, as Shatzkin and Houghton hoped, the panic in 2012 is about the chain – or rather, one member of it – making a meal of all publishing.

From the perspective of writers who care most about their craft and the particular manuscript they happen to be working on today, the fight is about as interesting as competition between football teams for someone whose game is boules. Yes,  certainly, who wins – and how – will have crucial consequences for their ability to make ends meet. But to survive financially, writers are better off ignoring the memory-loss endemic among Amazon’s critics and thinking flexibly, like Eduardo Porter, about a universe of possibilities lying before us:

For sure, if brick-and-mortar bookstores disappear, browsing will die with them. But writers and publishers will have plenty of other ways — think Amazon, Facebook or Google — of letting readers know about their books. E-books, moreover, can be profitable. […]  And even if every existing publisher were driven out of business, reading would probably survive. Without the middlemen, publishers might even pay higher royalties to creators.

Let us toast that prospect — make mine a two-shot latte, please.