The COOL-ER eBook Reader

My review of the device, together with some com­ments on how ebook read­ers might affect pub­lish­ing, can be found as a guest post over at Scott Pack’s blog today.

★ Audiobooks and DRM

For those of you who don’t know — and there’s no reason, per­haps, that you should — DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it is a tech­no­logy by which con­tent dis­trib­ut­ors (record com­pan­ies, for the most part) attempt to con­trol how a cus­tomer exper­i­ences their product.

Now, audiobooks.

The start­ing pis­tol for Internet-distributed audiobooks has been fired and Audible.com is at the ‘b’ of the bang. They have a huge selec­tion of titles read by great act­ors and if you go for one of their monthly plans, like I do, you can enjoy two books per month for very little cash. Top drawer.

The trouble? Audible’s titles are DRM’d. That is, they are locked down tight. Countless are the times I’ve said to a friend of mine, ‘Oh, you’d love this book I’m listen­ing to…’ and then trail off because I know I won’t be able to lend it. The DRM means only a few machines I’ve nom­in­ated can play­back the audio.

Well, this stinks. That much is obvi­ous. But you’d think that Audible are doing this because of the pres­sures put upon them by pub­lish­ers. It turns out that this is not neces­sar­ily the case. In an art­icle for Publisher’s Weekly art­icle, Cory Doctorow (whose book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I review here) relates the saga of try­ing to get (i) his pub­lisher, then (ii) Audible, then (iii) the online Apple iTunes store to offer his new book without DRM. Thus far, he’s only man­aged to con­vince the first two.

Audiobooks are fant­astic. They are unabridged, high-quality record­ings of stor­ies that you can enjoy when you’re out walk­ing, doing the dishes, or work­ing out. If Steve Jobs — and there­fore Apple — is ser­i­ous about his atti­tude towards DRM, he should make sure the online Apple store sup­ports pure, unfiddled-with MP3s for both music and the spoken word.

I’m pretty sure this is what read­ers want. It’s what I want.

As a coda, you can down­load an audiobook of the first edi­tion of Déjà Vu here — for £500.

H’only jok­ing! It is, of course, free as in air.

Cash or readers?

Matt Curran has some inter­est­ing things to say about remaindered books over at his blog.

Tacitus Schmacitus

Scott Pack replies to a Guardian piece by Stuart Jeffries that (accord­ing to Scott; I haven’t read it) is another ‘why can’t book­shops be like the old days’ article.

Among other things, Scott writes:

Less than a dec­ade ago it would have been pos­sible to walk into a branch of Waterstone’s, espe­cially some of the London shops, and ask for the best­selling book in the coun­try only to dis­cover that they didn’t stock it because ‘it wasn’t our sort of thing’. I remem­ber an occa­sion when one branch refused to unpack a sci­ence fic­tion pro­mo­tion because ‘our cus­tom­ers don’t like sci fi’. The same shop would com­plain whenever we ran a Jacqueline Wilson offer as ‘she’s a ter­rible writer and our cus­tom­ers can’t stand her’. I am not mak­ing any of this up. Is this what Jeffries wants? Really?

I’m not entirely con­vinced that this is a bad thing. When — years ago now — I was hawk­ing my own book around branches of Waterstone’s, I had assumed (along with the pub­lic, I think) that such book­shops are essen­tially autonom­ous. However, on every occa­sion, I was told that the manager/manageress lacked the power to make buy­ing decisions (or was too wor­ried to exer­cise it), even when the decision centred on four or five books of a local author. So if there was a time when the man­agers of Waterstone’s branches were less timid, I’d say wind­ing the clock back would be no bad thing.

He goes on to say:

Waterstone’s has branches in towns across the land. In some of these places a new Andy McNab novel will sell 20 or 30 times more than a new Martin Amis. The stock and mer­chand­ising of the shop should reflect that.

Which I agree with. I can’t stand Martin Amis and thor­oughly enjoyed Bravo Two Zero when I was a teenager.

There is an inter­est­ing ques­tion at the heart of this debate. What do you or I want in a book­shop? Personally, I don’t really want book­shops at all. I want the recom­mend­a­tions of my friends and a web browser that gets me to Amazon.

Literature and the shops that sell it are two dis­so­ci­able entit­ies. As are, I think, words and books themselves.

► Tacit agree­ment | theBookseller.com

What would Steve Jobs do?

Here’s an inter­est­ing present­a­tion by Dutch Internet strategist Freek Bijl on how ver­tical integ­ra­tion between the iTunes music store and the iPod might be applied to pub­lish­ing, with ref­er­ence to the fabled Apple tab­let device.

► How Would Apple Change Publishing? Here’s One Theory | Cult of Mac

Neil Ayres: The New Goodbye

Neil Ayres, co-blogger of Aliya Whiteley, writer in his own write, and all-round nice chap, is mark­ing the arrival of the Kindle on these shores, and tak­ing advant­age of Sony’s recent tie-up with Smashwords. He’s brought together some pre­vi­ously pub­lished short stor­ies (includ­ing Before Midnight, the flash piece I pod­cas­ted here) and released them as an ebook.

The book is free, and down­loads are avail­able in HTML or PDF and pretty much all e-reader formats: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/4783

A Publishing Event of Electro Proportions

Today’s Guardian Review con­tains an essay by the journ­al­ist Jenny Turner about the upcom­ing pub­lic­a­tion anniversary of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel).

On 12 October, the first Hitchhiker’s novel will be exactly 30 years old. That appar­ently is why the Adams estate has chosen the date for what it’s call­ing “a pub­lish­ing event of elec­tro pro­por­tions”: Eoin Colfer, the author of the Artemis Fowl books, has writ­ten an author­ised sequel, to be called And Another Thing (Penguin).

Turner makes an inter­est­ing point about the impact of the British class sys­tem on H2G2. Arthur Dent is a mis­placed, upper middle class radio pro­du­cer whose breed­ing and polite­ness mean noth­ing in the con­text of plan­ets blow­ing up and fail­ing to get the girl. The replace­ment of Simon Jones by Martin Freeman in the Hollywood film — effect­ively swap­ping out the upper middle for lower middle class — was crit­ical in the weak­en­ing of the mater­ial. (The other mis­take was the impos­i­tion of a three-act nar­rat­ive structure.)

Frankly, I find any dis­cus­sion of Adams’s work depress­ing. I don’t think that any other author has had or will have quite the same effect on me. What to make of Colfer’s new story, I don’t know. Can it be for any­thing other than money? How can he pos­sibly come out of this with bet­ter than a feel­ing that he hasn’t screwed up?

► Does the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy still answer the ulti­mate ques­tion? | Books | The Guardian

★ How Not to Be a Dick

An art­icle has passed my nose once or twice this week, ten­nis ball stylee. It’s by a man called Josh Olson, a screen­writer whose cred­its include the script for A History of Violence (itself based on the graphic novel of the same name). The art­icle is entitled — and the eas­ily offen­ded might want to cover their eyes at this point — ‘I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script’.

In it, Olson writes enter­tain­ingly about how he is forced to turn down requests by non-professionals to read spec­u­lat­ive film scripts.

Here’s a bit that’s been quoted fre­quently around the web:

​I will not read your fuck­ing script.

That’s simple enough, isn’t it? “I will not read your fuck­ing script.” What’s not clear about that? There’s noth­ing per­sonal about it, noth­ing loaded, noth­ing com­plic­ated. I simply have no interest in read­ing your fuck­ing screen­play. None whatsoever.

He goes on:

[…] If you’re inter­ested in grow­ing as a human being and recog­niz­ing that it is, in fact, you who are the dick in this situ­ation, please read on.

Yes. That’s right. I called you a dick. Because you cre­ated this situ­ation. You put me in this spot where my only option is to acqui­esce to your demands or be the bad guy. That, my friend, is the very defin­i­tion of a dick move.

It is entirely pos­sible that the per­son Olson refers to here is a genu­ine dick. There are some twenty-four carat dicks in the world; I’ve met some myself. However, there are occa­sions when a per­son puts you in a place where the only pos­sible out­comes will present you in a bad light because you can’t cope. It sug­gests to me that some grow­ing might be pos­sible on both sides. However, I didn’t write this art­icle to dis­pense pop psy­cho­logy. I’ve got some swear­ing of my own to do.

It rarely takes more than a page to recog­nize that you’re in the pres­ence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sen­tence to know you’re deal­ing with someone who can’t.

(By the way, here’s a simple way to find out if you’re a writer. If you dis­agree with that state­ment, you’re not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

My response to this is pre­dic­ated on being a teacher first and a writer second. In par­tic­u­lar, I’ve worked with some people who find it dif­fi­cult to express them­selves in writ­ten English. Essentially: Olson, belt up.

It is a per­sist­ent and toxic myth that the world is divided into those who can write and those who can­not. There was a time when Olson couldn’t write a damn. Me too, and my other writer friends. Like any appren­tice­ship, the road is long. Being labelled a ‘non-writer’ might well mean that your writ­ing is bloody awful — but that is rare. Most adult, nat­ive speak­ers of English who’ve read a good­ish num­ber of books, seen films, and can tell a story over the din­ner table or the pub, have the poten­tial to write some­thing that oth­ers might find com­pel­ling. Therefore, a pro­fes­sional writer can prob­ably come up with some­thing use­ful to tell the appren­tice writer.

Olson’s art­icle reads very much like a polemic writ­ten by a man who is pissed off with his cor­res­pond­ent (who replied to Olson’s dis­missal with a terse ‘Thanks for your opin­ion’) and prefers to share his response — essen­tially a ‘Don’t you know how busy I am?’ — with the world.

The thing is, would-be writers get vir­tu­ally no sup­port from the industry. Your manu­script will prob­ably get no feed­back from pub­lish­ers or agents bey­ond some­thing like ‘Your call is import­ant to us. Please hold and listen to Vivaldi for six months, then we’ll send you a post­card’. As a writer, you are expec­ted to present your­self to the pub­lish­ing industry fully formed. There is no uni­ver­sity for fic­tion (though some might think so). Manuscripts are not con­sidered with any due pro­cess or trans­par­ency. The sup­port net­work for writers com­prises, in effect, indi­vidu­als within the industry who are will­ing to give some of their time for free.

I’ve writ­ten about this before, but when I approached sev­eral estab­lished writers about read­ing my debut novel, I did not receive what I’ll term ‘Olson’s Dick Response’ (i.e. ‘I Will Not Read Your Fucking Book’) from any of them¹. You can see the product of that gen­er­os­ity in the quotes beneath the title of this blog.

I’m no angel myself. Would-be writers con­tact me with some reg­u­lar­ity, and if I have time — there’s not much of it — I’ll agree to per­use a chapter or two. A recent example is Stephen J. Sweeney’s The Honour of the Knights². Stephen sent me a polite email ask­ing if I’d read the book and I said, ‘Sure.’ As it hap­pens, because of work com­mit­ments, I’ve haven’t got fur­ther than a couple of chapters in — but the book is good and I’ve no doubt I’ll get round to fin­ish­ing it. The first scene, in which the main char­ac­ter par­ti­cip­ates in a space dog-fight, is com­pel­ling and character-driven. Now, OK; there are typos and what­not. No big­gie. Stephen is pound­ing pave­ments and get­ting his book into Waterstone’s (I know that pain) and doesn’t need people like me telling him to fuck off. If I like the book, I’ll do the nat­ural thing and review it, maybe bother someone fur­ther up the foodchain.

So, any­way: There are people in the industry who are not like Olson.

srsly

In today’s Guardian Review, Andy Beckett puts for­ward a thought­ful argu­ment about the dif­fi­culties of selling ‘ser­i­ous’ books¹ in today’s pub­lish­ing mar­ket. He talks in terms of non-fiction, but his argu­ments apply to fic­tion too.

“The mar­ket for really good books has not dimin­ished,” says Stuart Proffitt, the pub­lish­ing dir­ector of Penguin Press. […] Proffitt con­cedes that such suc­cesses take more effort than they used to: “You have to think more care­fully than ever before about every aspect of a book’s pub­lic­a­tion, how it looks, how you com­mu­nic­ate its exist­ence.” But he insists that the fears for ser­i­ous books are over­blown. “People in the book busi­ness are always say­ing there’s a crisis and we’re going to hell in a handbasket.”

The art­icle is reas­on­ably bal­anced, given its proven­ance, but I do won­der at state­ments like this:

There is a crisis in British book­selling, thanks to the inter­net, the reces­sion and the par­tic­u­lar com­pet­it­ive­ness of the British high street.

To make sense, this rests on defin­ing ‘book­selling’ as some­thing that excludes the Internet — a dis­tinc­tion akin to defin­ing a road vehicle as any­thing pulled by a horse. Why isn’t Amazon.co.uk seen as British pub­lish­ing? Sure, it’s an American-owned com­pany. But a quick search on Wikipedia con­firms that there are few UK pub­lish­ers who stand on their own two feet.

► Is it the end for qual­ity non-fiction? | Books | The Guardian

Him and His Big Mouth

Scott Pack is big on book cov­ers. Why? Because people who browse book­shops really do judge books by them, and as former Chief Buyer at Waterstone’s, Scott prob­ably had access to data that con­firmed this relationship.

A good freel­ance designer will charge between £500-£750 for a book cover. Hardly pocket money but, trust me, it could make the dif­fer­ence between selling a few hun­dred cop­ies and, oh I don’t know, SELLING FUCK ALL!

A book cover is tricky to get right. Frankly, it’s one of those things — like edit­ing video foot­age — that looks easy but isn’t.

► Me And My Big Mouth: Dear Self-Published Author