Brian Fichter of coolhunting.com held a prototype of Plastic Logic’s e-reader in his hands at New York’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference and declared he was “more than impressed.” This is the device we wrote about in September.

Fichter’s reservations are all about shape and color and feel (too beige, corners not rounded to his satisfaction, etc.), but these are cavils compared to the catalogue of advantages he lists, features that are going to give Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eReader some stiff competition when the, um, Whatsit is released. That’s not the name for it, but either PL is guarding it like the crown jewels or doesn’t have a clue what to call it. We’ll have to wait about year to know and to hold the device in our own hands. But for a preview check out the video of a demo at the Consumer Electronics Show, along with Fichter’s take on the device. Here’s an excerpt

With a form factor equivalent to that of a legal-size pad of paper, though coming in at half the thickness and weighing under 16 ounces, it’s easy to see the reader’s instant appeal. Compatibility with document formats like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs, in addition to newspapers, periodicals and books, means that users will no longer need to stuff carry-ons or briefcases full of papers when traveling. The reader has the capacity to store thousands of documents, all of which can be synced wirelessly or with wired access. Publishing partners already include fictionwise, the Financial Times, Ingram Digital and USA Today.

Fichter refers to the Plastic Logic device as a possible “Kindle Killer” but there’s an evil twin lurking in E-Book World, the iRex Reader 1000 about which we wrote last fall; it too was dubbed a potential Kindle Killer. Sounds like there’s a hit-team of assassins looking to whack Kindle, but for now the device is planted smugly on its throne guarded by a fierce contingent of amazons captained by Jeff Bezos.

RC

In case the growing number of entries into the e-reader sweepstakes is making your head spin, Channelweb has done us the favor of providing a roundup of Kindle’s competitors. We’ve covered some of these, like the iRex, the Foxit eSlick Reader, and the Plastic Logic Watchimacallit (they haven’t come up with a name yet).

Another bunch is described in Channelweb’s survey. Going into the clubhouse turn Kindle is ahead of Sony by several lengths, then there’s the rest of the pack, which includes such notables as the Jinke HanLin eReader, the Bookeen Cybook, the Netronix EB-100, the Fujitsu Frontech FLEPia, the Foxit eSlick, and the Polymer Vision Readius. Don’t smirk. Today’s tongue-twister could be tomorrow’s household name.

The Readius, depicted here, fits into your pocket and sports a screen that unrolls/unfolds. “It offers 30 hours’ worth of battery life (about 7,500 page refreshes),” says Channelweb’s summary, “a five-inch display and 16 levels of grayscale.” The display refreshes in half a second. As civilized humans haven’t read from scrolls in about three millennia, the Readius has our vote for most thought-provoking. Any bozo can reinvent the wheel, but it takes a special mentality to reinvent the scroll.

Despite the large field, it’s entirely possible that the winner hasn’t even stepped into the starting gate. Somewhere in a garage or basement of college dorm, a geek is working on something that might, just might, change the game completely…

RC

You have three days to visit the stunning collection of Hebrew books on display at Sotheby’s on East 72nd Street and York Avenue in New York City. That you reside in San Francisco, Bogota, St. Petersburg or Beijing is no excuse for missing the Valmadonna Trust’s library, nor can you beg off because you can’t read Hebrew. The reason you must make this pilgrimage is to rededicate yourself to the most precious of all of civilization’s artifacts, the printed book.

Thirteen thousand of them are displayed in a 2400 square-foot space, representing a bibliophile’s passion to assemble – literally from every corner of the globe including Africa – the world’s finest private library of Hebrew books. Some of the volumes were written three centuries before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, and many were produced within a generation of that event. Taken altogether, they bespeak the culture, scholarship and religious devotion of the “People of the Book” that thrived in such disparate locations as Cochin, Mantua, Fez, Calcutta and Baghdad.

Though the Trust’s collector, Jack V. Lunzer, could have maximized the library’s value by auctioning off the individual volumes, he seeks a single buyer that will treat the collection as lovingly as he. “Every one of these books I have held in my hands,” he told the New York Times’s Edward Rothstein. “They’re my friends.” When Rothstein asked Lunzer if he will miss them, he replied, “I’ll be happy if they are well kept and respected.”

A prayer found in one of the volumes reminds us of all that is sacrosanct about books: “Blessed be He… Who has magnified His grace with a great invention, one that is useful for all inhabitants of the world, there is none beside it, and nothing can equal it among all wisdoms and inventions since God created man on the earth: The Printing Press.”

RC

As the stakes continue to rise in the publishing business, writers are adopting a wide range of strategies to advance themselves out of the midlist and onto better-selling plateaus. I myself have recommended a number of such strategies. Recently, however, as I respond again and again to the question of what one can do to escape midlist oblivion, it’s begun to dawn on me that many writers have been ignoring the most obvious answer: write better. The truth is that if all other things are equal, the author with better writing skills is the one who will rise out of the pack.

Instead of reviewing what’s selling these days and who is buying it, I thought it might be worth reminding you about some of the most common and flagrant writing transgressions to be found in a typical harvest of fiction works that fetches up on my desk. I hasten to point out that the perpetrators are by no means mere amateurs, but professional writers as well, so let those who are without sin skip this article.

Click here to read more.

RC

Michael Hirschorn’s recent article in The Atlantic, a doomsday scenario projecting the death of the New York Times as early as May, chilled the intellectual community like an icicle rammed into its heart. For all who care about the shift of paradigms from Ye Olde Printe to digital media, his End Times (a canny pun) is required reading. The fact that a Mexican billionaire rescued the paper with a $250 million investment was a huge relief, for the New York Times Company had been facing a host of unpalatable options analogous to choosing among shooting oneself in the foot, the kneecap, the head or the behind. Sadly, numerous other newspapers and magazines bedeviled by the twin evils of collapsing circulation and plummeting advertising will probably not find such a benefactor. If you’re of a vulturine turn of mind you can learn about them on the website Newspaper Death Watch.

But it was a throwaway line in Hirschorn’s piece that turned my blood to curds. After summarizing the many obstacles that “The Newspaper of Record” faces, Hirschorn wrote, “Alternatively, Google or Microsoft or even CBS could purchase The Times on the cheap, strip it for parts, and turn it into a content mill to goose its own page views.” In other words, instead of rescuing and reviving the paper, the buyer could send it to the journalistic equivalent of an automobile chop shop.

Anyone who’s had a car stolen knows what a chop shop is. It’s an underworld garage where your car is disassembled and the tires, headlights, fuel pump and every other valuable part is removed from the chassis and sold to sub rosa auto body shops. If you think of the New York Times as that car, and its contents the carburetor or transmission or hub caps, perhaps your blood will curdle too. But why stop with the Times? Every struggling print publication is vulnerable to a similar dismantling.

And so, my dears, are book publishers.

Do we believe that they would be less subject than newspaper and magazine publishers to acquisition by media giants whose only interest is mining their content? We would like to think so, and there’s some precedent for hoping it wouldn’t happen. As a rule, in the history of book publishing in the last few decades struggling publishers have been picked up by stronger and more affluent publishers that understood how to exploit the backlist of the acquiree. But there are plenty of examples of publishers being taken over by members of entirely different species, corporations or conglomerates that have little or no emotional attachment to books or empathy for the people who write, edit and produce them. Looking back over the last few turbulent decades we see that a number of publishers were acquired for the cachet of culture and intellectualism; as soon as the cachet wore off and the realities of razor-thin profit margins sank in, the owners were more than happy to dump their book publishing assets.

Today, many of the publishers that are struggling are not modest in size – they’re giants, as characterized by layoffs, reduced acquisitions, or budget cuts by such behemoths as Simon & Schuster, Random House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin, Macmillan and Harper. If things were to get worse, or even if the owners were hard-up enough for cash, we could see another round of acquisitions by companies less interested in the culture than, simply, in the content. And off the top of my head I can think of outfits like Ingram, Adobe, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Verizon that might make a tasty meal of the rich trove of intellectual content in books. The cost would be petty cash to them. Some of these companies have dipped their toes into publishing and backed off, but that was then.

It this scenario too fanciful to credit? Any publishing person over 45 years old has seen things he or she would not have believed could happen, the buying and selling of titans like Random House, Doubleday, Putnam, Bantam, Macmillan and dozens of others as if they were trading cards in a childrens game.

Back in 1986, for the year-end issue of Publishers Weekly, I contributed a bit of doggerel entitled Merger, He Wrote summarizing the orgy of mergers and acquisitions that had taken place that year. Here’s an excerpt:

With tax-law changes ‘round the bend,
Other houses joined the trend.
CBS unloaded Holt:
To Harcourt Brace the firm was solt.
And, glasses raised in loud “L’Chaim!”,
Scott Foresman joined the march of Time.
More turbulence: Congdon & Weed,
Atlantic Monthly Press, Dodd, Mead.

Thus in frenzied syncopation
Proceeds the trade’s consolidation.
Scores of famous names of yore
Have since succumbed to corporate war
Or publish books with but a semblance
Of their former independence.

As the value of print media drops, and the power and wealth of digital media rises, another round of acquisitions could be shaping up, and this one won’t inspire poesy, good-natured or otherwise. Chop shop operators are standing by…

Richard Curtis

“Merger, He Wrote” Copyright (c) 1986, 2008 by Richard Curtis

A few months ago we profiled publishing futurist Mike Shatzkin, and the title pretty much said it all: If You Think 21st Century Publishing Is Scary, Wait ’til the 22nd!

Shatzkin has come roaring back with a new set of prognostications about the publishing industry, this time encompassing a shorter term – ten years. Not surprisingly, his conclusions are provocative to say the least. Here are some bullet-point summaries.

* “Someday, all data and applications will be ‘in the cloud’ – that is, existing independently from, but accessible by, digital devices. All the devices most used every day will then need almost no memory.”

* Media consumption will take place by people choosing from a wide variety of devices. “You’ll pick up one kind of screen/device to read a memo you’re working on, another one to look at the work of your favorite photographer, and pull a rolled-up one out of your back pocket to read a book or newspaper on the subway or at the beach. And those don’t include the ones on your walls for a movie, or for a piece of art.”

* “Over time, Wikipedia, Facebook and Google will morph into looking like each other in many ways (that is: search, community and information will all come from the same sources) and the new, meaningful sorting of sources will be vertical: by communities.”

* “We’ll all be joining lots of communities online, chosen by our interests and values, and by referrals from our friends. And these will ultimately become the hubs of marketing. And of publishing.”

* “Ten years from now, there will still be more books sold that were printed centrally and warehoused for sale than all other ways combined, but the end of that era will be in sight.”

* “Barnes & Noble will be the only full-line brick-and-mortar bookstore. It will sell used books as well as new ones, and we’ll be far along the road to it becoming one of only five organizations that really distribute consumer books nationally.”

* “Almost every book that goes ‘national’ will have been incubated through the niche-publishing farm system first. Agents and packagers constantly will survey the niche-publishing landscape, looking for projects that might warrant much more expensive marketing and distribution through one of the big distributors.”

* “The robust e-book market – more than 50 percent of the sales of many titles (also a bit more than 10 years off) – will have been fueled by features built into e-books that can’t be replicated in print versions. For example, e-books will frequently use moving images as illustrations, rather than stills. And, of course, e-books all will have links…”

God willing, we’ll be around to see how Shatzkin’s prognostications turn out, but they sound right to me. The wise will take them to heart and plan accordingly. Others will put their thumb in their mouth and hope the future will go away. Here’s a prognostication of my own: it won’t.

For more of Shatzkin’s dazzling projections into the future of the media, click here. And while you’re clicking, visit the website for his new venture, Filed by Author. It will be a comprehensive directory of authors and their works. Every author in the United States and Canada with an active ISBN will have an easily updated free web page with photos, videos, and website links which can be accessed by readers, publishers, reviewers, potential rights buyers and fellow authors. The site is currently in “private beta”, Shatzkin tells me, but authors can register and claim their pages now. If his crystal ball is as accurate about his own project as it has been about everybody else’s, ten years from now Filed by Author will be the indispensable database it’s designed to be.

RC

Mathematician, computer scientist, programmer, software designer, teacher, lecturer, artist and pioneer in cellular automata – a perfect resumé for someone destined to become a science fiction writer. This curriculum vitae belongs to Rudy Rucker (for the long version, click on his page on the E-Reads website). Harder to predict from his background is that he would be a founder of the SF subgenre called Cyberpunk.

Rucker wrote his first science fiction novel, called Spacetime Donuts, in the summer of 1976, and E-Reads has the pleasure of bringing it back. Today it’s in e-book, but shortly it will show up as a print volume as well. The logline? A seaweed-smoking rebel becomes an incredible shrinking man. Intrigued?

Subsequently he wrote six books, developing cyberpunk themes with such books as Software and Wetware. Each won a Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback SF novel of the year.

But Rucker wasn’t finished innovating. He was developing a writing style he called transrealism, defined as writing about one’s real life in fantastic terms. One such book is The Sex Sphere, in which the author turns his time spent in Germany into a tale of higher dimensions and nuclear terrorism. That one too is an E-Reads e-book, and it too will soon be available in paper for those who like hard copy.

Rucker is a brilliant innovator and we’re delighted to deliver these two terrific books to you.

RC

1986: Merger, He Wrote

Last autumn, while their Mets amazed us,
Doubleday completely fazed us.
The firm’s intrepid admiral, Nelson,
Ignored Dad’s warning: “Never sell, son.”
Learning that he sought a buyer,
Several firms essayed a flyer.
But the wealthy Menn of Bertels
Came on like a herd of turtles,
Snapped the house up in their bill
For just about five hundred mil.
Meanwhile, Penguin’s Peter Mayer
Became a major hard-soft player.
Rallying his Viking Norsemen
(After asking his of-course men),
Mayer bid for NAL.
The owners were disposed to sell,
For splendid profit them awaited
When these behemoths were mated.

With tax-law changes ‘round the bend,
Other houses joined the trend.
CBS unloaded Holt:
To Harcourt Brace the firm was solt.
And, glasses raised in loud “L’Chaim!”,
Scott Foresman joined the march of Time.
More turbulence: Congdon & Weed,
Atlantic Monthly Press, Dodd, Mead.

Thus in frenzied syncopation
Proceeds the trade’s consolidation.
Scores of famous names of yore
Have since succumbed to corporate war
Or publish books with but a semblance
Of their former independence:
Coward, Crowell, Playboy, Grosset,
Dutton, Scribner, Morrow, Fawcett,
Prentice-Hall and Dial and Dell,
Random, Bantam, NAL,
Lothrop, John Day, Quick Fox, Jove,
Lippincott, Pop Libe, and Grove,
Bobbs and World and Atheneum . . .
There’s no end to our Te Deum.
Huge conglomerates expanding
Till scarcely anyone’s left standing.

Is it possible we’re heading
Toward one great climactic wedding,
When all but two remain unmerged,
The rest absorbed, acquired, or purged?
The final stage of evolution,
The ultimate event of fusion,
A blinding flash, a cosmic bang,
The Yin becomes one with the Yang.
Emerging from the hot debris,
A publishing monopoly,
A monolith whose awesome goal
Is seizure of complete control
Of every stage of publication
From the author’s inspiration
To remaindering and pulping.
“Why,” I hear you loudly gulping,
“You’re just disseminating fear.
Surely that can’t happen here. . . . “

Copyright (c) 1986, 2008 by Richard Curtis

Whenever people talk about e-book reading devices they use the iPod as the metaphor for a game-changing innovation. But Matt Buchanan, blogging on the Gizmodo website, reminds us that the original iPod was no game-changer by any stretch of the imagination. “The first iPods didn’t overturn any market. They were just marginally better than their competitors, but they were limited to Mac users only, had mechanical scroll wheels and were easily damaged.”

Buchanan’s point is that if the Kindle actually does turn out to be the “iPod of books”, it may take a while – and a lot of upgrades and refinements – before it blows away the competition and becomes the standard by which all other devices are measured.

And Buchanan doesn’t think that either Kindle or the Sony eReader is there yet. His quarrel is with screen display: “As of now, there are two display camps – electronic paper and LCD – and both have far too many compromises at the moment to be adequate for a reading revolution.”

Does he see any candidates emerging? He likes what Plastic Logic is producing: “A perfectly-sized flexible plastic touchscreen that’s basically all E-Ink display, plus Wi-Fi.” (For a rerfresher on Plastic Logic’s extraordinary no-name entry into the e-reader sweepstakes, click here.) But even the Plastic Logic approach has issues, Buchanan goes on to say. He also cites a new company, Pixel Qi, which is “reinventing the LCD”. An executive he talked to “says that Pixel Qi’s displays are actually more readable than e-paper, with “excellent reflectance, high resolution for text, sunlight readability” – just as easy on the eyes when the backlighting is turned off, but with the key advantages of full color and fast refresh, for pages that update as fast as video.”

Read Why There Isn’t a Perfect Ebook Reader. Kindle and Sony have a very strong position in the race to be the iPod of books, but there’s still room for new contenders and, as so often happens in technology, the winner could come from a radically different source than any in the current landscape. Such as the clothing people that designed the iPod bikini pictured here. Touch where indicated to advance to your favorite tune.

RC

The original teleplay that became the classic Star Trek episode, with an expanded introductory essay by Harlan Ellison, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ has been surrounded by controversy since the airing of an “eviscerated” version – which was subsequently voted the most beloved episode in the series’ history.

In its original form, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ won the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay. As aired, it won the 1967 Hugo Award (the only teleplay ever to do so!). ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ is, at its most basic, a poignant love story. Ellison takes the reader on a breathtaking trip through space and time, from the future, all the way back to 1930s America. In this harrowing journey, Kirk and Spock race to apprehend a renegade criminal and restore the order of the universe. It is here that Kirk faces his ultimate dilemma: a choice between the universe – or his one true love. This edition makes available this astonishing teleplay as Ellison intended it to be aired. The author’s introductory essay (expanded by 15,000 words from the limited edition) reveals all of the details of what Ellison describes as a “fatally inept treatment” of his creative work.

Was Harlan Ellison unjustly edited, unjustly accused, and unjustly treated?

RC