Something along the lines of a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.

John Edgar Wideman sounds like he’s fed up with self-publishing and will publish his new collection of short stories with print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

It must sound appealing; throwing off the shackles of a stifling publishing program to go it alone. However, one must never confuse printing with publishing.

Whether or not Wideman thinks his publisher (Houghton Mifflin) gave due diligence to his books, setting up shop with a print-on-demand company puts him among other authors whose only requirement is that they pony up the cash required.

I’m not saying that New York publishing is the most reliable gatekeeper, or even that gatekeepers are required, it’s just that while print-on-demand may sound like a sweet deal for all concerned, it usually means a raw deal for booksellers. Bookstores cannot order Lulu.com books the same way they would order a book from a regular publisher: discounts tend to stink, invoicing is non-existent (usually these companies are pre-paid only) and books are non-returnable.

It just seems to me that Wideman is trading one publishing ghetto (that of the marginalized midlist author) for another.

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While I haven’t confirmed this with anybody who works for Harpercollins, according to Entertainment Weekly, Sarah Palin is poised to write another book.

A few folks might scratch their heads this news, yet it makes perfect sense: she shifted a lot of units for her publisher, and probably more than made up for her advance (it helps that she used money from her PAC to buy copies of the books, as well as pay for her own publicity tour), so it would stand to reason that Harpercollins would rush another book.

In fact, I think we can safely assume that she sold more books than 80% of the Harpercollins roster in 2009, so why wouldn’t they?

Time will tell whether she will ever appeal to an audience beyond her base (which is a significant) in a national election, but if politics ever falls through for her, she can at least look forward to a comfortable living cranking out books that will continue to polarize the public.

(Photo credit Mike Theiler/Reuters-taken from EW.com…is it me, or does that hat make her look rather Castro-esque?)

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We recently got a galley of the upcoming book Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern (Harper HC 9780061992704 $15.99, due May 4th) and let me tell you this: I normally loathe books based on blogs (or in this case, a Tumbler micro blog), but this is seriously funny. I can’t remember the last time I had to catch my breath from laughing so hard.

My co-workers seem to agree, as any thought of getting work done is obliterated in an endless succession of guffaws.

The language is colorful to say the least, and many of the quotations are unprintable on this blog, but here’s a prime (and clean) example:

You look just like Stephen Hawking … Relax, I meant like a non-paralyzed version of him. Feel better?… Fine. Forget I said it.

It’s not rocket science when I say that this will be the Stuff White People Like for 2010.

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Writing at the New York Times, Motoko Rich does the math for us and determines (after making some reasonable assumptions), that ebooks don’t actually generate more profits for publishers, even at the $15  price point.

Again, it reminds us that the people who demand $10 or cheaper ebooks on one hand don’t think publishers should be allowed to make a decent profit from the books, but don’t mind allowing ebook readers to generate profit for folks like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

This is the reverse of the old making money from razor blades school of business. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, what’s wrong with making money from razor blades (in this case ebooks)?

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Yes, I know that I blog about Philip K. Dick a bit too often to be considered healthy, but the design wonk in me wants to push it to the limit.

There was a link over the weekend on io9 to the blog of Antonello Silverini, an Italian graphic artist who designs book covers. He’s got a great eye, but what really catches my eyes (and the eyes of io9), are the covers he did for the works of Philip K. Dick for the Italian editions published by Fanucci Editore.

Below is the cover for La Svastica sul Sole (The Man in the High Castle).

I love it. It’s deliriously abstract, yet, in the context of the book, is absolutely appropriate.

The covers remind me a lot of Czech film posters. While below is an extreme example, reinforces my belief that you don’t have to hit the reader over the head with obvious or pedestrian images (such as close ups of lips, or pictures of feet, or unpopulated landscapes) to sell a book.

If you didn’t have the cast listing on the above poster, you’d never know it was for Ghostbusters.

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Over in the UK, there is a heated debate centering over the proposed boycott of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film by the largest theater chain in the country.

At the center of the controversy is Disney’s (the studio releasing the film) desire to release the DVD version of it around three months after the theatrical premiere, instead of the usual four months or more.

As this Guardian article covering the brouhaha reminds us, the studios make most of their money not in theatrical engagements, but rather in DVD sales and content licensing for television and downloading. To Disney, it makes sense to tap into this audience while the ink on the marketing is still wet.  This saves them from having to do a second wave of it for the home versions, but at the same time upsets theater operators who fear that patrons will choose to stay home and wait for the home video release.

Also, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that with this strategy, Disney is trying to put a dent into online piracy.

This got me thinking about how books are released. Is there a calculus that the publishers consult in figuring out the window between hardcover and paperback release dates? Most publishing employees I speak with admit that their hardcover releases are really sort of the farm team for the paperback editions.

But what if publishers collapsed the window, and rushed the paperback edition while the memories of the author’s Oprah appearance and newspaper interviews were still fresh in readers’ heads?

The ongoing debate about ebook pricing makes this argument event more relevant. If customers are demanding ten dollar ebooks, where is the ancillary hue and cry over the windows between hardcover and paperback? The ten dollar ebook (and let’s face it, no matter what Macmillan or Apple do, most ebooks will be sold for that price or less) is a response to both the growing demand of ereader owners and the fear of the even cheaper and less profitable alternative of piracy.

I wonder if publishers keep readers waiting for less expensive versions of their books (in electronic or paperback versions), how long will it be before the audience who would have purchased the paperback version of the book will just throw in the towel and download it illegally?

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One aspect of the dispute between Amazon and Macmillan that has not generated as much ink as the initial skirmish is the impact that ebook pricing, whether it’s $10 or $15, will be on small independent booksellers of the bricks-and-mortars variety.

I mean it’s good that authors will get compensated appropriately, and that publishers are allowed to recoup their investments, but what is the impact on traditional booksellers, and where do publishers think that they fall in all of this brouhaha?

On one hand, the publishers can be seen as sticking up for bookstores, demanding comparable pricing for ebooks as for old-fashioned paper and ink versions. However, this pricing only benefits the chains (and Amazon’s non-ebook products), who drastically discount books anyway (at pricepoints that rival the new ebook prices) and doesn’t do very much for independent booksellers and wholesalers, who pay for books based on the publishers’ list price and cannot run a business based on loss leaders.

Bottom line, $15 ebooks prolong bricks-and-mortar booksellers’ suffering, it doesn’t end it.

Paul Oliver (a former bookstore co-owner) states an eloquent case about the lack of love sent to booksellers’ way at The Devil’s Accountant, and is well worth a read.

(Via MobyLives)

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As I type this, Apple is approaching the sale of their billionth iTune download, needing just 4,400,000 downloads. Currently, according to their countdown page, songs are being downloaded at the rate of about 60,000 songs per minute. This could be chalked up to the contest they are having, in which the lucky billionth download will win its buyer a $10,000 iTunes giftcard.

iTunes was first introduced in2001, so you can say that they’ve sold over a billion songs a year in its lifetime, and at $.99-$1.29 per song, that’s a lot of money changing hands.

Now, nobody expects digital books to sell as quickly and in a similar volume to individual songs, but ebooks have been around longer…so how long before book downloads hit even a tenth of such a staggering number?

(via Gizmodo)

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I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that when I visit somebody’s house for the first time, I make it a point to scan their bookshelves to see what sort of reading material this person is into, as I like to think that the books say something about the owner.

Or at least that’s what I used to think.

Conservative bloggers are having a field day because one of their own was taking a tour of the White House while he was killing time before the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and, while in the library, happened upon some books that to him revealed that the First Family’s radical Communist agenda.

Yes, nothing will brand you as a Commie quicker than a dusty copy of The American Socialist Movement 1897-1012.

Sad thing is that the library in question was in fact curated at the behest of the First Lady…in 1963.

So, while this whole episode turned out to be embarrassing for the blooger who saw the books as evidence of Communist sympathies, it reminds me not to be so quick with judgment the next time I scope somebody’s bookcase.

After all, what impression would somebody get looking at my bookcases? A shelf or two of books on the Third Reich (which I studied in college as a German major) might make me look like a Nazi. That copy of Jeff Noon’s cyberpunk novel Nymphomation? I must be a deranged sex addict. That copy of the biography of Trotsky that Harvard University Press recently released? I must be in league with the Obamas!

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