If the CEOs of Detroit’s big three automakers are working for a dollar to save their industries, do you think that the Stephen Kings, the Malcolm Gladwells and the Stephenie Meyers of the world would write their next books for a buck?
Ever the risk-taker, science fiction author Jeff VanderMeer has taken it upon himself to become a philosophical guinea pig by reading 60 books in 60 days. But not just any books, mind you, he’s going for the big guns by reading Penguin’s Great Ideas series.
From now until mid-February, he’ll read a book a day and blog about it the following morning. Readers so inclined can follow along as VanderMeer traipses his way through Seneca, Swift, Marx & Engels, JJ Rousseau, George Orwell and many more.
It’s a very interesting experiment in auto-didacticism. VanderMeer’s most recent subject was On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer (below).
It’ll be interesting to see if VanderMeer can agree with Schopenhauer’s maxim that “Knowledge is in itself always painless” when he reaches the end of the series.
(via io9.com)
Wicked author Gregory Maguire is going to read an original Christmas story on NPR’s All Things Considered on Christmas Day.
According to their website, the story will be based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl. You can hear a preview here.
If you don’t plan on spending Christmas Day huddled around the radio, I’m sure that NPR will make it available via a podcast of some sort.
PC World has a feature on the new ebook reader in town: the eSlick.
It doesn’t have much going for it compared to the Kindle. There is no wireless access to download content, and, visually speaking, let’s just say the product designers from Apple aren’t losing any sleep.
That said, eSlick has pluses: it has an mp3 player, and it costs (for now) about fifty bucks less than the Kindle.
The mp3 player is what makes this interesting for me. Just one step closer to combining an ebook reader with a portable media player.
But, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Unless ebook readers actually start making new readers (that is, people who read), they will be little more than a niche. A possibly lucrative niche, but a niche nonetheless.
(via wired.com)
The weather in the Pacific Northwest has been crazy. There has been snow nearly every day for the past week, and Portland is currently glazed with a delicious layer of ice. And it still won’t get above freezing for a few more days.
While the winter weather is a bummer for booksellers already hobbling in a horrible economic climate, it has given us a lovely visual aesthetic. It’s like a Thomas Kincaide piece, if he painted cars stuck in ditches and slow-moving public transit.
For New York publishers, anybody who still has a job and can fog a mirror is taking the week off, so it isn’t likely that there are going to be any breathtaking announcements for the next few days.
So, between the holiday cycle and the lack of warm bodies at publishers, posts will be sporadic between now and New Years Day.
If you need a break from dealing with customers cursed both with the last-minute-shopping psychosis and cabin fever, I present a demented holiday favorite.
Joyeux Noel!
In case you or your children didn’t get your quota of films featuring talking rodents filled by the Stuart Little movies, now is your chance to close that gap.
Alison Morris has a thorough review of the film from a bookseller’s perspective over at her PW blog Shelftalker. It’s got lots of spoilers, but she gives fair warning when they happen.
But, if you’ve already read the book, I guess there really isn’t that much to spoil.
Speaking of the book (Candlewick PB 9780763625290 $7.99), make sure you are well stocked!
Yesterday, I wrote a post regarding Borders’ decision to go non-returnable with HarperStudio. It has generated a lot of coverage (the decision, not my post), but very little analysis. The best that I have come across so far was written sixteen years ago.
However, while it sounded like I was poo-pooing Borders and Harper Studio, what would happen if Random House, or all of Harpercollins’ imprints, decided unilaterally to go non-returnable? Would any bookseller in their right mind not order the next Dan Brown novel because it’s non-returnable? Most likely not. Berttelsmann would not ship as many units out of the gate for sure, but they would know that those copies wouldn’t be washing back up on their shore. Booksellers might order conservatively, and may run out of a hot title. But imagine the buzz that would circulate around those hard-to-find books. Remember the old days of building a book, rather than shipping as a blockbuster?
Recently, Hachette waited until the 11th hour to pull the trigger on Twilight reprints, in an effort to allow the copies that already were in the marketplace to sell through. That two week period where nobody had inventory didn’t diminish demand for the books. At the same time, Hachette is controlling the release of inventory into the marketplace so that it isn’t over saturated, Bookstore customers aren’t binge buying Twilight, and, come January, Hachette probably won’t get flooded with returns.
It’s irritating to be out of stock on a title, but what did we do before just-in-time delivery?
I recently had a conversation with a former sales rep of a large commercial publisher. It seemed that one of their important writers (a writer of thrillers) whose contract was up for renewal threatened to leave the publisher unless they promised to ship three million copies of his upcoming title. The publisher caved, the contract was signed and the book was promptly oversold. There is a reason that Richard Branson is a billionaire and this author isn’t: ego and business acumen rarely go hand-in-hand.
The bottom line is that every few years, somebody comes along and talks about shaking up the rules of publishing, particularly when it comes to returns. However, these idealistic notions tend to quickly fall by the wayside, and it’s back to business as usual. But now that the nation (not just the industry) is facing its long dark teatime of the soul (to steal a phrase from Douglas Adams), it’s in everyone’s best interest to reach a consensus as to the future of returns.
Now that the era of cheap oil, easy credit and debt-leveraged expansion are over, I wouldn’t be surprised if others start following in HarperStudio’s footsteps.
Taking a break in covering publishing’s body count, the Wall Street Journal reports that Borders is going non-returnable with HarperStudio.
However, as the S.S. Borders limps along in the marketplace, I have to ask: will Borders still be around when HarperStudio starts releasing books next year?
This isn’t wishful thinking or even Schadenfreude. If Borders goes under, it will have profound ramifications on the industry, from bankrupted publishers to leaving Barnes & Noble the sole large-scale bricks-and-mortars book retailer in the country.
Over at io9.com,
However, much as I love writer Grant Morrison, I would swap out his All-Star Superman Vol. 1, and replace it with Brian Azzarello’s The Joker (below-DC HC 9781401215811 $19.99).
I would also throw in Alex Robinson’s Too Cool to be Forgotten (Top Shelf HC 9781891830983 $14.95), Jim Warren’s Creepy Archives Vol. 1 (Dark Horse HC 9781593079734 $49.95), and Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics HC 9781560979210 $39.99). This last title isn’t a graphic novel, but rather a gloriously illustrated biography of the enigmatic co-creator of Spider-Man.
Travel author Lawrence Osborne has some rather perilous observations on the state of the publishing industry over at Forbes.com.
He doesn’t tread any new ground here, but he does provide a nice encapsulation on the cause of a number of publishing’s current woes.
But for me, he really knocks it out of the park with his conclusion: “We the readers, the people, are not dumbed down media serfs obsessed with celebrities, dosh and movie rights. You are”.
(Via GalleyCat)