Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media which publishes many technical and programming manuals for all the arcane branches of system management, specific languages, operating systems, design & graphics, databases, you name it. He has been around the tech business (and the publishing business, too) for quite a while and has probably forgotten more about some of today’s “new ideas” than the people who think they’ve invented those ideas have ever imagined. Needless to say, he’s worth paying attention to when he talks about matters technical and book-related. Not least among his accomplishments, O’Reilly was involved with GNN, the first ever commercial website and the place that ran the very first banner ad.

Fortunately, he sees blogging as a useful tool for plugging his product lines and his ideas and he also has a sense of humor since his corporate blog is named Radar. The M*A*S*H reference certainly tickles my fancy.

In a recent post, O’Reilly has some pointed, intelligent and business-like things to say about one of our favorite topics, the Kindle, as well as about e-book pricing, potential markets, making a profit and other relevant issues. He observes the enthusiastic and optimistic chat about how e-books need to be priced at no more than $5 each to broaden the market and how some writers have expectations, or at least hopes, that they will get rich, or at least make lots more money, selling updates to people who buy their book for the Kindle. (“I’ll sell 40,000 e-book copies of my book and 25% of those people will pay me an annual fee for the updates and maybe I’ll make some money by making my e-books ad-supported as well and…”)

He applies hard-won knowledge of the ways of the marketplace (Think no more than 1%, not 25% as a likely subscriber ratio and don’t forget that Amazon will take 65% of each sale since you’re a solo content-provider…) and brings things down to earth. I can taste the reality in what he has to say because I’ve had my own versions of that glorious optimism and the inevitable sober reflection when the final picture doesn’t turn out to be as rosy as the hopes that propelled the initial effort.

What he says may be discouraging on one level but it isn’t intended to discourage. It’s intended to make people think in terms that can actually be realized. It’s intended to make people actually do the math and realize that if you sell too cheaply, you aren’t necessarily going to make it up on volume. (Although that’s an experiment that probably should be tried in multiple variations.) It’s intended to make certain that rational planning and disciplined expectations rule the day and that massive disappointment down the line is less likely because “irrational exuberance” is not the order of the day.

By the way, not only does what O’Reilly say make sense, he elicits voluminous comments and a much higher percentage of them make sense than I’m used to seeing in most other blogs. I’m planning to add his blog to my must list.

– John

Writing is extremely hard work, and writing funny is one of the hardest kinds of writing there is. The world is such a tragic place that it does not, it seems to me, require great creativity to depict its misery; any good journalist can do it. But to show it as silly against all evidence to the contrary–oh, that is very hard to do. For that reason, of all the things I have had published I am proudest of my humor.

I produced a lot of it when I was a full-time professional writer, and I enjoyed some gratifying successes. Several humor pieces appeared in Playboy, garnering a couple of the magazine’s annual awards in the Best Satire category. As evidence I submit two foot-high lucite monoliths in which are embedded silver bunny medallions engraved with my name. They serve as bookends in my office.

The exigencies of starting my literary agency compelled me to stop writing, however, and that’s how it stood until I began writing a column for Charles Brown’s science fiction trade publication, Locus. The subject of my column was the publishing business.

Those of us who toil in that trade don’t always have either the opportunity or the objectivity to see the comical aspects of what we do. For one seeking a dark view of our industry there is much confirmation: publishers gobbling each other up, dedicated editors summarily released from long-held jobs, an antique and horrifyingly wasteful system of distribution, books orphaned and ruined by corporate indifference, cruel inequities between a pampered handful of best-selling authors and a host of desperately underpaid and unappreciated ones–well, I could go on and on. And I did, chronicling these and other harsh realities in my column for twelve years.

As time went by, however, I achieved a bit of perspective, and began to see the ridiculous side of our enterprises. The world is indeed a tragic place, and if you take for your measure of tragedy such horrors as the destruction of the World Trade Center in the United States, mass starvation in Ethiopia, chemical genocide in Iran, murderous warfare in Israel, and floods in Bangladesh, then the horrors of orphaned books, underpromoted authors, and bankrupt publishers do seem petty, pathetic, and preposterous by comparison.

Besides, even at their most earnest, authors and publishing people are very funny. Maybe that is because we consider ourselves descendants of Eighteenth Century wits, the bearers of the torch of reason that illuminates human folly. Or maybe it’s because the dispositions of writers and editors are, more often than not, sunny. And why should they not be? Compared to workers in most other fields, publishing people have it pretty easy. As for authors, though they are an oppressed class, you only have to hold their oppression up against that of South African miners or Mexican farm laborers to keep things in proportion.

Most of the lampoons in this book were originally published in Locus. I am grateful to Charles Brown for tolerating their appearance in its pages, as he told me on more than one occasion that he did not feel his publication is the appropriate forum for satire.

As for the poems, toward the end of 1986, the phenomenon of editorial job-hopping in the publishing industry reached such a frenzied state that I was compelled to pen a few score lines of good-humored Iambic tetrameter about it. These were accepted by Publishers Weekly, the magazine of the publishing trade–in large measure, I believe, because they included the only known rhyme with the name of the then-Bantam executive, Lou Aronica. After the first one, and for several years thereafter, PW editor John Baker called me every autumn requesting another. He seemed to be under the impression that poetic inspiration is seasonally guaranteed, like the running of maple sap. Luckily, the turbulence of the publishing world proved to be unending, and as long as publishers went on devouring each other or playing musical chairs or overpaying for dreadful books, I endeavored to rise to the challenge of setting it all forth in rhyme.

Fair reader, you are well advised not to linger over the specific names of the personalities who populate these poems. Instead, read them for the gist, as you might read a Milton poem laden with classical references. (Not that I would presume to compare myself to Milton, unless you mean the late television comedian Milton Berle.) In fact, the faster you read the poems, the more you will appreciate the frenetic madness of the last decade. I will, however, be happy to annotate the names for scholars sifting through the midden of that once-great civilization known as book publishing.

Those of us who toil in the publishing trade don’t always have the objectivity to see the comical aspects of what we do. If you seek a dark view of our industry you’ll find lots of confirmation: publishers gobbling each other up, dedicated editors summarily released from long-held jobs, an antique and horrifyingly wasteful distribution system, books orphaned and ruined by corporate indifference — well, I could go on and on. And I did, chronicling these and other harsh realities in a column I wrote for Locus, the science fiction trade magazine, for a dozen years.

As time went by, however, I achieved a bit of perspective and began to see the ridiculous side of publishing. The world is certainly a tragic place, and if you measure tragedy against war, famine, earthquakes and floods, then the horrors of orphaned books, underpromoted authors and bankrupt publishers do seem petty, pathetic and preposterous by comparison.

It’s in that spirit that I offer The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires. What if an alien visited Earth seeking intelligent life but, after studying publishers, concluded the planet was not worth a second look? Suppose a visitor from another galaxy engaged a literary agent to handle book and movie offers? Picture a convention of authors so jealous of each other that they rend their agents limb from limb a la Night of the Living Dead? Those are some of the nutty concepts you’ll find in my book. And, if you’re a denizen of the publishing industry, you may get a kick out of my end-of-the-year poetic spoofs that appeared in Publishers Weekly. You can hear more about these in my introduction.

Have your royalties plummeted? Editor left the industry? Publisher gone bankrupt? Smile — it could be worse!

- Richard Curtis

If you were browsing a book in a store and the jacket blurb said,

“This is one of the best books of the year!”
– amazon.com

…would you be inclined to buy it?

Before you say no, here’s something to think about.

Any author who wants to get published successfully must run a gauntlet of “gatekeepers” who judge whether the work has artistic and commercial merit. Among the Cerberuses guarding the franchise on taste are literary agents, editors, bookshop and chain store buyers, critics and reviewers. Today’s Big Publishing establishment is dominated by such gatekeepers. They also guard tradition and guard it fiercely, and who can blame them? If the gates are breached a way of life comes crashing down.

Like a walled city, the gates enclose a world of tangible books produced in physical offices and distributed to brick and mortar stores. Until recently there was no other world, and as stupid and clunky as it is, somehow we’ve all managed to find a way to make a living in it. But now the Digital Revolution is eroding that world, just as it has done to so many business models that depended on middle agencies for distribution of tangible products. Today’s publishing model is a virtual one, and can be reduced to a simple formula: A Writer, A Reader, A Server. Absent from this formula, you will readily note, is A Reviewer. The question arises, in a world where books are sold virtually, do we still need reviewers?

After all, one of the keystones (to use a tangible image for an intangible concept) of Internet marketing is the way that public opinion can be instantly and virally created and marshaled into an economic force. Do we need gatekeepers to help us judge whether we should buy or read a book?

I happen to think that not only do we need them, we really can’t exist without them. And the interesting news is, we are creating a new class of pundits. Though their taste, judgment and experience may be no better than yours, we listen to what they have to say and, like it or not, we’re influenced by them. In particular I’m referring to the people who review for Amazon.com.

The idea that your next-door neighbor’s opinion may affect your decision to buy or pass up a book seems unlikely. True, word of mouth has always been a factor in the fate of successful books, but usually the mouth that the words come from belongs to someone you know, not an anonymous name on a website. But wait — when you search your Zagat guide for a restaurant recommendation, do you know who has written the review? No, but in all likelihood it’s a restaurant patron with no more professional reviewing credentials than yourself. That doesn’t stop you from saying, “Let’s go here!” Some of your neighbors thought the food was good, the place clean, the atmosphere pleasant, the service excellent, and the prices right, and that’s good enough for you.

In short, we live in an age when peer review is meaningful if not significant, and Amazon.com has used this fact to create a cadre of reviewers who must be taken seriously. Go to Amazon, click on any recently published book and page down beyond the official reviews (Publishers Weekly, New York Times, etc.). You’ll find Customer Reviews, and note that many of the reviewers identify themselves as the authors of a number of reviews. If they regularly review or blog about specific genres you may in time come to the conclusion that this person’s judgment is reliable and enlightening. Thereafter, when you see his or her name next to a review of a new book, you may very well be motivated to buy it.

It’s worth your time to click on the link that says “See all my reviews”, or on the badge beneath the reviewers name. Amazon has created a badge system to help you identify the reviewers credentials and review-worthiness.

I haven’t seen too many traditional books with Amazon.com quotes blazed on the cover, but I won’t be surprised if that changes before long. The first time you see one, let me know, and remember you heard it here first.

- Richard Curtis

Here’s another brief bit from one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch. Although the Kindle, Amazon.com’s brand-new e-book reader (about which we have blogged extensively) sells books in the proprietary, locked MobiPocket format, the writer points out how easy it is to download book files from any of the myriad BitTorrent sites (where all those illegal file copies–music, movies and, yes, books, too–can be found if you’re not worried about being tracked by the RIAA or any of the other organizations dedicated to chasing after data thieves).

Now, there are a number of sites, like Project Gutenberg, where files exist for any number of out-of-copyright/public domain titles. These files can be downloaded for free and used as the reader chooses. They are often posted in multiple formats like .txt (Text only), .pdf (Adobe Reader), .doc (Microsoft Word) and .Lit (Microsoft Reader). The Kindle can read text and Word files and the other two are easily converted into one or the other of these formats and they can then be added to the Kindle via the dedicated email address that comes with every Kindle account.

However, the BitTorrent sites have files for lots of books, including plenty of brand-new copyrighted titles, that can be downloaded just as easily, converted to whatever format seems best and loaded onto the Kindle via that same email address.

It’s easy. It’s quick. It’s convenient. It’s free. It’s also completely illegal–but we haven’t seen that stopping too many music collectors or movie fans now, have we? Are book readers more honest and law-abiding than music and movie fans? There’s no real way to know until some deep-pocketed publisher, or a publishers enforcement organization, starts tracking downloads and suing everyone in sight. Perhaps it won’t come to that but Amazon has given all those downloaders a way to put their files, legally obtained or otherwise, on a handy portable reading device.

Maybe that Attributor story I did a while back, the one about a company whose service tracks content appearances on the net, begins to make a lot more sense. I wonder what they charge?

- John

A couple of months ago, Richard blogged about Japanese writers creating novels on their cell phones. There’s a more recent story that expands on the story and offers some startling information on how successful some of these writers are becoming.

I caught this story at TechCrunch, one of my personal go-to’s for techie news with a business slant, and their source was a piece in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. For a nice additional note of surreality, the date on the newspaper piece is December 3 and the TechCrunch coverage of that story is dated December 2. Gotta love the International Date Line and globe-spanning technology. This probably also means that from the point of view of all the nations in the Pacific Rim, us North Americans are perpetually living in the past, doesn’t it? I’d never quite thought of it that way before. It may be more appropriate than we want to think about, too.

Anyway, not only are lots of people in Japan writing novels on their mobile phones, a goodly number of those writers are becoming bestsellers. The specific author interviewed in the story, 21-year-old Rin (a pseudonym for a nursery school teacher) initially posted the segments of her novel (Moshimo Kimiga–If You…) to a website as she was writing them but a publisher picked up the book, put it into print and has now sold 420,000 copies in just a few months. There’s even a name for the phenonomon: keitai shousetsu (mobile phone novels) and one of the other stats quoted in the article is that a site set up seven years ago to help people write their mobile phone novels, Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), has accumulated almost one million of them.

An incidental side note of related interest is the mention in the story that a new translation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has sold more than 300,000 copies so I suppose we shouldn’t automatically despair for the collapse of classic literature, in Japan at least. I wish I thought there was even a slim likelihood of such sales occurring in this country in the same situation. Maybe if Brad Pitt and Keanu Reaves were to star in the movie…

In any case, smart and opportunistic Japanese publishers are jumping on the bandwagon and Miss Rin is not alone in her success. A book called Koizora (Love Sky) by “Mika” has sold 1.2 million copies since being put into print a little over a year ago. And, since we’ve been behind Japan on the mobile phone technology curve for years and years, maybe we should brace ourselves for the same thing to be happening here–around about 2011 or so.

- John

Christianity, like Judaism, did not begin with a god or a king. Both religions were founded by humble figures born in insignificant corners of the world with an ancestry buried in obscurity. Judaism began about four thousand years ago, with a seventy-five-year-old pagan named Abraham, born in Babylonia, whose father was, according to legend, a merchant of idols. Christianity had its start two thousand years later, in 1 A.D., with a Jewish infant named Jesus, born in Nazareth, whose putative father was a carpenter.

Jesus lived thirty years—twenty-nine of them in obscurity. He entered history with a baptism at the beginning of 30 A.D.; a crucifixion ended his life before the year was spent.

Though this crucifixion took place nearly two millennia ago, the drama is not yet over. Though his accusers are dead, witnesses vanished, and the judges dust, the trial of Jesus nevertheless continues. Though crucified, dead, and buried, he still lives in the faith of his followers. The death of Jesus, not his life, is so central to Christianity that without this crucifixion there would be no Christianity.

How should a historian view the phenomenon of this Jew Jesus to whom serfs, priests, and nobles have knelt in homage for nineteen centuries; in whose name people suspected of heresy were consigned alive to the flames of autos-da-fé; in whose image crusades were launched to convert by force people of other faiths to a creed abhorrent to them; yet in whose spirit was created Western Civilization, to me the greatest and most magnificent civilization in the history of mankind?

Who is this Jesus who, though there are over one billion Christians today, failed to make an impression on history until a century after his death; about whom there is not enough validated historical material to write a decent obituary; yet about whom more volumes have been written than about anyone else—over sixty thousand books just in the last hundred years.

From the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century to the Reformation in the sixteenth, everything written about Jesus was mostly a variation on the same theme—Jesus as the son of God. During those centuries, scholars prudently shied away from cross-examining the authors of the Gospel. One could be excommunicated or burned alive by a vigilant Church for examining too closely the validity of their assertions.

Thus, for the first 1700 years of the Christian era, ideology triumphed over evidence. Then, with the eighteenth century and the Age of Rationalism, evidence triumphed over ideology as scholars began to defy the Church and contradict the theologians. Views other than that of Jesus as the son of God dawned on the scholarly horizon. From the eighteenth century to the present, this new breed of scholars speculated not only on the theological but also on the historical Jesus. The problem was, in the words of the Catholic historian Ernest Renan, “how to preserve the religious spirit whilst getting rid of the superstitions and absurdities that form it.”

In this three-century search for the historical Jesus, scholars uncovered six additional views—or faces—of him, all at odds with the official Church version and with one another.

But, the reader might object, if there hardly exist enough facts about Jesus to write a decent obituary, whence all the material from which scholars draw their information for these other divergent views of him? Interestingly enough, most of it is derived from the same source—the testimony given in the Four Gospels. How can this be so?
To draw its portrait of Jesus as the son of God, the Church selected those passages in the Gospels that supported its beliefs. Secular scholars, on the other hand, selected those passages not stressed by the Church, fashioning them into other concepts of Jesus consonant with their beliefs. But since all seven views originate from the same source, all represent, in a sense, the Gospel truth.

The seven portraits of Jesus etched by the Church and this new scholarship are varied and fascinating, giving rise to vexing questions. Is Jesus the Christian messiah, the literal son of God as averred by the devout? Or was he a Jewish messiah, the son of man, stripped of his Jewish garments and robed posthumously in Christian vestments? Was he a Zealot who tried to wrest the throne of David from the Roman oppressors by force? Was he a “plotter” who masterminded his own crucifixion and resurrection in the sincere belief that he was the messiah? Was he an Essene, a member of an obscure Jewish religious sect that practiced a primitive form of Christianity a century before his birth? Or is Christianity the creation of another Jew, Paul, who shaped the historical Jesus in his vision of a theological Christ? Or was he a “Gnostic Christian,” a libertine practicing occult pagan rites as claimed in the recently discovered Gnostic gospels? Finally, was Jesus perhaps a combination of all of them, some of them, or none of them? But no matter who avers what, no one disputes Jesus was a Jew.

The Four Gospels, however, are not only a great literary work but also a great mystery story. In the center of that mystery, which contains all seven interpretations of Jesus within one leitmotif, are the four enigmatic predictions he made to his disciples.

All four evangelists concur that, after stating that he must go to Jerusalem, there to fulfill his destiny, Jesus three times made the following four predictions: that he would be arrested by the Jewish priests; that he would be tried by the Romans; that he would be crucified by the Romans; and that he would be resurrected (“rise again,” as he expressed it) in three days.

Several puzzling questions arise. At the time Jesus made these predictions he had done nothing to warrant either an arrest by the priests, or a trial by the Romans. Was he planning to provoke them to take such actions?

Another puzzle. The Romans crucified only seditious slaves and rebels against Rome. But, as Jesus was neither a slave nor at this point a rebel, did he plan to foment a revolt to merit such a predicted fate?

And the final puzzle. Why did Jesus predict a resurrection after three days? Why not after two days? Or four? Or one?

The Four Gospels affirm that all his predictions were fulfilled. This confronts us with a host of new questions. How were they fulfilled? Were they accidental or did God arrange for their fulfillment? Or did the evangelists write their own scenario and then retroactively attribute these predictions and fulfillments to Jesus?

Or did Jesus himself engineer events in such a way as to bring about the fulfillment of his own predictions? If so, how did he achieve it? And for what purpose? Like skilled mystery writers, the evangelists subtly reveal the clues to the fulfillment of each prediction as the story progresses.

This book not only will explore all seven faces of Jesus and his four predictions, but will also tell the incredible story of Jesus and his impact on Jews, Romans, and the future Western Civilization in the century from his baptism to the publication of the Gospel of John, and how, in that one century, five faithmakers—Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John—transformed an inglorious crucifixion into a glorious resurrection and laid the foundation for the future Christian conquest of the Roman Empire.

- Max Dimont, from Appointment In Jerusalem

As we count down the days until Christmas, age-old questions about the true identify of Jesus loom over our spiritual consciousness. Max Dimont’s Appointment in Jerusalem clarifies the questions themselves, and speculates on some intriguing answers as well. Was Jesus a Zealot plotting to overthrow Roman hegemony in the Holy Land? Was he a member of an occult and libertine group of Gnostics? Did he come out of the obscure Jewish Essene sect, which created a form of Christianity before there was a Christ? Or was he indeed the son of God as the devout believe?

Appointment in Jerusalem, offered by E-Reads in both print and e-book editions, will not settle the debate but will certainly clarify the issues. Here’s the introduction, and we invite your comments.

Wishing you a happy holiday season.

- Richard Curtis

(Pictured above, Fabriano’s “Adoration of the Magi”

Thanks to Shelf-Awareness, a website and daily newsletter that covers many things book- and bookseller-related, for pointing me to this story. If you’re interested in these topics, their daily email would be well worth your time. And, thanks, too, to Amazon.com for doing their part to defend everyone’s First Amendment rights.

On November 27, Associated Press released a story about Amazon’s run-in with a Federal prosecutor in Madison, WI who wanted all the records, including full customer information, on 24,000 transactions dating back to 1999. Seems the prosecutor was building a tax fraud case against a former Madison city official who, in his spare time, or possibly on city-paid time, sold lots of books as an Amazon affiliate. In their not-particularly-Constitution-minded zeal to find potential witnesses, they had no problem subpoenaing personal information on who knows how many thousands of individual customers. Unsurprisingly, Amazon chose not to comply with the subpoena and, hearteningly, one Judge Crocker supported their reluctance to reveal the information. Now that charges have been filed, the Judge, at Amazon’s request allowed publication of his hitherto-sealed decision which led to the prosecutor’s withdrawal of the subpoena.

Perhaps even more interesting is a related blog entry by Declan McCullagh, The Iconoclast on News.com, which contains a Q&A with Amazon.com’s vice president for litigation, in which the litigator answers some questions about how often Amazon gets such requests and how they deal with them.

It’s bad enough that the DHS is out there wielding gag orders so that bookstores can’t even mention that they’ve been asked to reveal information when a question of terrorism is involved but when a prosecutor starts trying to subpoena wholesale quantities of private information, you have to begin to wonder if any of these people have ever read a small document usually referred to as the United States Constitution. If they have, it seems like maybe they’re just using it as a set of guidelines for what new legalistic excesses to pursue.

– John

There was a fascinating piece of news published a week or so ago. I stumbled onto it in a link to a site called “Stuff” or, more properly, stuff.co.nz, which means, according to my understanding of these things, that the site is registered in New Zealand.

The gist of the story is that a Harry Potter fan, George Lippert by name, wrote a story involving Harry Potter that takes up after the end of the final book in J.K. Rowling‘s massively successful seven book Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and then posted his story on his own website.

Now, there’s a long underground tradition of what is referred to as “Fan Fiction.” Essentially, fans of a given book or movie or TV series use the characters and settings from their favorite, or favorites if they’re feeling extra-frisky, and write original adventure stories that fall outside the established (read “published” or “broadcast”) canon. In these stories, almost anything can happen from romances to marriages, from wild adventures to cross-species mating. I first heard of this sort of thing in association with the original Star Trek TV series back in the 1960s and I think that may even be where a lot of the ideas for this sort of thing originated since there don’t seem to be too many examples that pre-date that time.

The trick with all of this, of course, is that the various media franchises from which these fan writers “borrow” the characters and settings are owned by large media entities who have shown, on occasion, a tendency to be highly litigious in order to protect the value of the properties they control. In a lot of cases, these corporations may be aware of the existence of these unauthorized stories and simply turn a blind eye as long as they don’t see the fan writers doing anything ambitious like printing and selling copies of their stories. Think of it as some dirty little secrets that aren’t really secret and probably aren’t all that dirty either.

The interesting news part, though, is that J.K. Rowling herself has taken a public position and said that she won’t be suing anybody who writes Harry Potter stories as long as they don’t sell them and as long as they make it clear that Rowling is not herself personally involved in the stories. That’s more than a bit of a leap past the point of turning a blind eye and strikes me as, if not revolutionary, at least generous-hearted and benign. From all I’ve seen over the years, that doesn’t surprise me about her but I do tend to wonder what her publishers and her movie production company think about her decisions to say in public what they’ve only really ever allowed “under the table,” so to speak. The photo that leads this story is from that “Stuff” story link and I can’t help but think that the smirk in her expression is the result of feeling the power she now has to make large entities smile and do what she wants–and more power to her.

- John