Dave Duncan’s extraordinary new novel Against the Light, just released by47North, Amazon’s science fiction imprint, has soared to the Number One ranking in Science Fiction on the Kindle bestseller list. Amazon is cross-promoting Duncan’s other books, most of which are published by E-Reads.

In Against the Light the Hierarchy, high priests of the religious order the Light, has installed King Ethan as the monarchical figurehead, ruling both the magical kingdom of Albi and its predominant religion. Scattered throughout the land, worshipers in the old ways of the Earth Mother are persecuted as heretics. And when young missionary student Rollo Woodbridge returns home to Albi, he is immediately arrested for heresy and treason, setting off a chain of events that plunges the land into utter chaos.

The Hierarchy has more treacherous motives, however, and when Rollo is rescued from jail, his family’s home is destroyed—but Rollo and his siblings are left alive. While Rollo tries diplomacy to end the religious and political conflict, his brother and sister swear vengeance. With the hours to deliverance counting down and their lives hanging in the balance, they must decide whether to stay and fight or leave Albi forever in the suspenseful, action-packed Against the Light.

If you like Against the Light as much as we think you are going to, you’ll find lots more Dave Duncan fiction on his author page on the E-Reads website.

“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” an Apple executive recently told a reporter. “Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

That says in a nutshell what many American corporate leaders are privately saying if not publicly admitting.  One leader who said it out loud was Apple’s Steve Jobs, and the person he said it to was Barack Obama. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs reportedly said to the president at a Silicon Valley dinner in February 2011.

“The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple,” write Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher in a penetrating New York Times analysis. “It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

The reason why is illustrated in a telling anecdote. “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul,” Duhigg and Bradsher report. ” New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.”

Though the human price for such ant-like efficiency is dear – Apple’s Asian workers live in conditions close to indentured servitude – the moral downside of manufacturing success does not seem to tip the scales for American corporate leaders. “Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” a Labor Department economist told the reporters. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Rather than wring their hands, American business and government leaders need to focus on the kinds of jobs that Americans can perform profitably – and with dignity – inside their national boundaries. If some domestic industries need subsidization by the government to be competitive, our lawmakers must channel support to them and even erect some tariff barriers. If that tilts our economy towards state socialism, so be it. It will balance the unfair advantage that many foreign governments have taken of America.

Details in How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Richard Curtis

In The Loveliest Dead horror master Ray Garton is at the top of his macabre form. The “loveliest dead” are far from lovely but they are definitely dead and making life hell for the living.

Following a sequence of increasingly dire personal tragedies, culminating in the unexplained death of their four-year-old son, Josh, Jenna and David Kella plan to make a new start of their lives on the old family homestead they’ve inherited just outside Eureka, California with their surviving son Miles. What they discover, though, is a nightmare. Ghostly children play on the backyard swings and vanish abruptly. In a cruel and maddening irony, one of the child ghosts resembles their dead son Josh. The horrors pile up as psychics, Ouija boards and poltergeists drive the couple to the borders of madness and terror.

Ray Garton is the author of close to sixty books of which perhaps the best known is Bram Stoker nominee Live Girls. Almost twenty reissues can be found on Garton’s author page on our website.
RC

Sony, one of the earliest companies to recognize the future of e-books, has been a retail partner of E-Reads for many years and a solid contributor to the royalty stream of our authors. We hope they will continue to be, but we’re concerned about speculation by Martyn Daniels on the Bookseller Association’s blogsite that the corporation may be getting out of the e-book game. The most visible reason is the $2 billion loss the firm took in the last quarter of 2011 for all of its operations and a projected loss for the year of $2.8 billion.

“Sony once aimed its sights at being a big player in digital publishing,” writes Daniels. “It created its own ebook format,…was an early backer of the ePub format and of course introduced several eInk ereaders. It even entered into one of those ‘exclusive trade deals’ with UK retailer Waterstones. However it failed to deliver the list, did not develop a plausible platform and lost the eInk world to Kindle. Some five years on and how times have changed. Sony were around at the beginning of the digital reading chapter, but this may be one ebook that will remain unfinished and is in danger of slipping from the front list and going out of digital print.”

Daniels’ conclusion? “Its hard to see Sony making a comeback into digital publishing and its offer would require some serious investment and change of fortunes at a time when the business obviously requires to focus on its core operations.”

But Sony has replaced its CEO and we hope the new commander will set the ship on a profitable course once again, including the company’s e-book program.

Are Sony’s Days in E-Books Numbered?

Richard Curtis

Containing the whole Science of Government (from Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens)

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be—what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

That will be $9.99 plus tax, Mr. Bezos

This website tries not to traffic in rumors but the one that Michael Kozlowski, writing on trade blog G00d eReader, posted over the past weekend is too titillating not to mong (and yes, “mong” is a legitimate verb).

“Amazon sources close to the situation,” writes Kozlowski, “have told us that the company is planning on rolling out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months.”

Amazon’s purpose is to explore the profitability of physical bookstores, which would carry Amazon e-readers and related products, as well as books from the various Amazon imprints (but not likely anybody else’s). Though described as a “boutique,” it would undoubtedly be a cross between an Apple store and a Barnes & Noble superstore. “The company has already contracted the design through a shell company”, says Good eReader.

Not so fast, Kozlowski.

For one thing, the world of bricks and mortar is as far from the world of digital as the 18th century is from the 20th. Though Amazon’s automated warehouses are state of the art, bookstore retailing calls for many disciplines outside Amazon’s comfort zone.  More significant is Amazon’s aversion to paying taxes.  The company has moved heaven and earth to minimize state and local tax liabilities, something that will be all but impossible to achieve with physical stores.

So, for now we’ll relegate this story to the rumor bin.  But if there is any truth to be told we won’t hesitate to mong it.

Amazon in the Process of Launching a Retail Store

Richard Curtis

Despite the gloomy talk about the death of the book it’s pretty clear that printed books serve an essential function in our culture and will always be with us. For those who greet this statement with skepticism, we reiterate that there is nothing wrong with printed books – just the way they are distributed.

The big difference between the past and the present is that for the first time in history, printed books are optional. The implications of this fact are profound.

Until very recently the only mode for publishers to introduce content was print.  Printed books defined publishers. With the advent of digital technology, however, a new breed of publisher arose that can if it chooses publish a book originally in digital format and postpone the print edition or skip it altogether.  Well into the present decade traditional publishers like Random House and Simon & Schuster and Macmillan clung to the imperative to issue print volumes before releasing them as e-books.  Eventually they yielded to the exigency of releasing the e-book simultaneously with their print edition.  Issuing e-books without having to do print editions at all, however, is not a measure to be taken lightly.

One reason is commercial. Original e-books put traditional publishers at a serious competitive disadvantage. Whereas those houses currently pay 25% net royalty to authors, most independent e-book publishers pay at least twice that much, and self-published authors can get as much as 70% royalty by direct uploading of their content. The Hachettes and Harpers and Penguins can reason that they are adding value and brand-name prestige, but that argument doesn’t hold water for many authors who are simply in the game for money.

More significantly, by electing not to print a book at all, these so-called legacy publishers put themselves in danger of losing the very thing that defines them. What profiteth a publisher to gain the world and lose its soul? Today Random House is a completely different species from independent e-book publishers like Open Road.  But by becoming a pure e-book publisher, the playing field is leveled, and the difference between Random House and Open Road becomes simply one of scale.

When we talk about the death of printed books we are really talking about the death of printed books distributed in bookstores.  With the death of a Borders and the announced reduction of Barnes & Noble’s  bookstore floor space by 25%, print on demand, a business model that does not depend on store sales or the returnability of books the way traditional bookstores do, increasingly becomes an option. If publishers elect POD for all their books they will not only continue to make money from printed books but could potentially rescue their identities, and maybe their souls as well.

Richard Curtis

A while back we wrote about an alien race’s scheme to capture Jupiter (Psst. Want to Buy a Hot Planet?) and haul it out of the solar system. E-Reads happens to carry another book about moving a planet, Greg Bear’s Moving Mars. Aside from the astonishing but completely valid scientific basis for transporting a planet from one locus to another, its a wonderful novel about a young colony yearning to free itself from the influence of the parent world’s exploitive government. The parent world happens to be Earth. And the government is not happy. Not happy at all. Its planning to punish the wayward colonists, and there’s absolutely nothing the populace of the Red Planet can do.

Or is there? There’s this nerdy kid Charles who has a scheme so risky and preposterous that in all likelihood it will blow up in his face like some schoolboy chem lab experiment. Except its not a chem lab. It’s a planet.

Well, how many schoolboys have let that discourage them?

But Casseia believes in him. She’s the rebellious daughter of a conservative family, and she sees Charles’s cockeyed idea as fuel for the student protests she’s leading. It’s hard to imagine a less likely love object than Charles, but maybe Casseia could learn to get attached to someone who thinks he knows how to save their world. Maybe this tender love story explains why it wasn’t just the science fiction reviewers that loved Moving Mars (“…an accomplished, thoroughly mature novel that should be placed at the top of anyone’s ‘to be read’ stack” – Science Fiction Age), but the romance reviewers too (“…a grand adventure in hard science fiction” – Romantic Times).

E-Reads carries a great list of Greg Bear’s backlist titles and there are more to come!

- Richard Curtis

(Above image of Mars courtesy of NASA.)

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Today he might say “No man ever writes the same text twice.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Wall Street Journal, contends that digital word processing “is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse…Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen.”

For better:  “It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed or to once charming inns that have turned into fleabags. The instructions in manuals will always be accurate. Reference books need never go out of date.

Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents. Polemicists will be able to bolster their arguments with new evidence. Novelists will be able to scrub away the little anachronisms that can make even a recently published story feel dated.”

For worse: “The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today.”

It was not long ago that when we thought of books we thought of immutability, fixity, indelibility.  Now we’re going to have think about them another way.

Books That Are Never Done Being Written

Richard Curtis

Josh Sternberg of digitday.com reminds us that NewsCorp’s news app, The Daily, celebrates its first birthday this week, and after one year it’s not just viable but a growing commercial success in an Internet environment hostile to the publication’s business model: subscription.  Yet it has a quarter of a million monthly readers and 100,000 paid subscribers.

Though (full disclosure) my son is a reporter for The Daily, my enthusiasm for the app is completely independent.  I just happen to think it’s terrific. But don’t take my word for it – it’s the iPad’s third most popular app.

Though The Daily started out as a dedicated iPad application, it is now accessible on Android, but the eye-popping graphics play best on the iPad’s big bright touchcreen. Some fairly heavy-hitting advertisers like Verizon, IBM and BMW display their wares there.

“I think it is the future of print,” digitday quotes a media executive, an odd description since there isn’t a single drop of printer’s ink associated with the publication.  But that’s just the point: it delivers all the news, culture and entertainment of a printed newspaper or magazine, but the videos, popups, callouts and other dazzling graphics are exactly what the iPad was created for. If you don’t have one, borrow it, download a two-week free subscription and see for yourself.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”. I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

The Daily After One Year: Some Lessons Learned

Richard Curtis