When the time comes for me to lay down my sword and armor and cross into the Great Beyond after a lifetime of combat with venal publishers, crooked movie producers, treacherous lawyers, and kvetchy authors, it is my fondest hope that the gods will reward me with perpetual publishing luncheons. What fardels would I not bear knowing that such a treat awaited me on the other side!

Some agents and editors feel lunches are tedious obligations at best and duck out of them whenever they can. I find them incredibly exciting, frequently dramatic, and always enlightening: I have never come away from one without having learned something useful. And, if everything comes together perfectly, the occasion can be a transcendental experience both culinarily and literarily, a sublime blend of art, commerce, and hedonism.

For an inside look at what happens at an agent-editor lunch date, click here. But know that this once sacred ritual appears to be doomed.

Richard Curtis

Students, your term paper worries may be over. Just submit your topic to Kosmix. It’ll collect and assemble information from the Internet, then “build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly,” writes New York Times‘s Miguel Helft. “For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.”

“Type in ‘Kauai,’ for example, and Kosmix will return a fairly rich page that includes an entry from WikiTravel, a user-created travel site; restaurant recommendations from The New York Times; photographs and videos from services like Flickr and YouTube; audio clips of local music; reviews of guidebooks, bed-and-breakfasts and other services; blog posts and more. It also has top results from Google, and suggests a list of related topics.

Company founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman recognize that the magnitude and complexity of the Internet have made aggregation and integration of information for reports, theses, term papers and the like overwhelming. Enter Kosmix, which Helft points out “has built a huge taxonomy, a set of nearly five million categories on topics from people and locations to car models, music groups and types of cheese.”

The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories. That allows Kosmix to recognize that Kauai is not only a place, but also a popular travel destination, a tropical island and a beach resort. Based on those and other categories, it chooses the types of content sources most relevant for a query on Kauai and organizes them by using a proprietary algorithm. It draws that content not only from Web sites, but also from more than 1,000 specialized Web services, search sites that focus on single topics, and databases connected to the Internet.”

Helft thinks Kosmix can give Google a run for its money. The founding team is battle-tested, having already developed a number of successful services demonstrating that their system works. Kosmix may be the icing on their cake. Says one of the partners, “With the explosion of information on the Web, it is very hard to have an editorial function with only humans. We are giving you an automated editor for any topic.”

Just for fun, I visited the Kosmix website, which is (per the website’s masthead) in “Beta-ish,” and typed in ‘literary agent”. In a few seconds it spat out a succinct description. However, it seems to have been taken in its entirety from Wikipedia. There were links to Wikipedia and Google in case I wanted to learn more. I had expected Kosmix’s definition to be original or at least more of a true synthesis. If I wanted to get my definition from Wikipedia or Google, I didn’t need to take an extra step visiting Kosmix. Did I say term paper worries are over? Students, if you get caught quoting Wikipedia verbatim, proceed straight to Flunk City.

When I entered some other test words in the Search box, cookies popped up that were weirdly far from what I was looking for, and they disappeared before I had a chance to explore them.

For all that, Kosmix is an original concept and we look forward to seeing the next iteration when the Beta-ish wrinkles have been ironed out.

RC

The prolific and perpetually inventive Warren Murphy has produced over one hundred novels in the Destroyer series. E-Reads has fifty of them for sale, and more are on the way. But – Murphy produced another series, Trace, built around the exploits of a dissipated insurance investigator. His assignments always seem to involve people who die not long after an insurance policy has been taken out on them. When Devlin Tracy – “Trace” – is not recovering from drink, gambling, or womanizing, there is no one better at his job. The problem is, he’s always doing one, the other or all three.

E-Reads is reprinting all seven thrillers in the Trace series. In the title novel. Trace’s part-time hooker girlfriend is off on an out-of-town trick, but alimony bills are piling up and his assignment is to find out if an idealistic doctor is dedicated to killing his patients instead of curing them.

The other novels in the series are:

And 47 Miles of Rope
Once a Mutt
Pigs Get Fat
Too Old a Cat
Getting Up With Fleas
When Elephants Forget

Pigs Get Fat won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best paperback original of 1985.

If you want to take a day off from Destroyer, pick up a Trace or two, or seven. They’re all in e-book, and very soon will be in paperback.

RC

Publishers Lunch reports that Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio “is allocating $50 million of its $125 million capital budget this year to retail, IT, the Internet, digital initiatives and other items.” This comes on the heels of its recent acquisition of Fictionwise, the world’s leading deliverer of e-book content. Riggio said his customers are eager to expand their choices beyond “the four walls of our stores.”

RC

Annalee Newitz posted a segment of a film called Oh Hello, made specifically for Microsoft, demonstrating What Computers Will Look Like in Utopia, According to Microsoft. But at MIT, Utopia has already arrived.

First, Microsoft. Newitz says,

I actually think this depiction of future interfaces is pretty accurate, with transparent wall monitors (these already exist), gesture-controlled computing, multi-use devices that are location-aware, and best of all real-time translation between natural languages. Plus, apparently, the “pinch” gesture from the iPhone has become ubitquitous on PCs in this happy world.

Possibly the translation scenes are the most utopian, however. We see kids in the US communicating seamlessly with Indian kids; and later, a woman meets a business colleague and her comments to him on the phone appear to get translated instantly into text he understands. This is obviously supposed to be the refined version of Google translation, which today can get the job done but still leaves a lot of words weirdly translated.

But if you’re impatient to get to Microsoft’s virtual future, instead of waiting fifty years you only have to wait as long as it takes for this video of a mindblowing demo to buffer up. At a recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Conference, MIT Media Labs’ Pattie Maes presented a wearable “Sixth Sense” device developed by colleague Pranav Mistry that produces astounding virtual effects at the wave of a finger.

Prepare to be astonished.

RC

E-Reads is happy to announce that the complete collection of R. A. MacAvoy’s novels is now available both in paperback and e-book formats. Click here for the complete list, including five recent additions: The Book of Kells, The Third Eagle, and the Damiano trilogy.

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MacAvoy is the highly acclaimed author of imaginative and original fantasy fiction. Her debut novel, Tea with the Black Dragon, won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has also written the Damiano trilogy, the chronicles of a wizard’s young son set in an alternate Italian Renaissance; The Book of Kells, Twisting the Rope (the sequel to Tea with the Black Dragon), and the beloved Lens of the World trilogy. The Third Eagle is her only science fiction novel.

RC

If you’re worried that visiting our website will reveal preferences and predilections you’d prefer to keep private, be aware that soon Google will be watching you and you may find yourself the target of Google-sponsored ads. Unfortunately, you may not find refuge at other websites – they too will be monitoring you. Behavioral targeting is coming to the Web.

What this means is that every time you visit a website that carries Google ads you will be creating a cookie that serves as a kind of spoor enabling Google to analyze and categorize your tastes. Whereupon, as described by the New York Times‘s Miguel Helft in Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests, “Google will then use that information to show people ads that are relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting.” Google has blocked out some 600 categories of interest in 20 broad groups, and if you’re not sure what categories you fall into, you’ll find out soon enough when ads start popping up that appeal to your preferences. Or at least to what Google infers inferred to be your preferences. Golf? Furs? Sports cars? Triple ply toilet paper? Google is recording your clicks and preparing pop-up pitches.

In its announced initiative Google reassures us that it will not drill too deep into such highly sensitive areas as our sexual orientation or health issues, but just where the line of sensitivity is drawn will be interesting to discover. Users who feel their privacy has been breached will be able to review the information Google has harvested and edit it. Which raises a host of interesting questions, for what’s to prevent users from inventing preferences just to throw Google off track?

Website operators will be free to opt out of the Google program. Publisher sites displaying Google’ AdSense service will have to post a Cookie and Privacy Policy, such as this one sugested by Google:

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site.
• Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.
• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

By way of disclosure, E-Reads does not at this time harvest information about its visitors. However, because we do use AdSense we are obliged to post a cookie and privacy policy in the very near future. Do you have an opinions either way? Let us know in the comments of this post.

RC

Publishers Lunch Deluxe, picking up on a story in PRNewswire, reports that Discovery Communications has filed a patent infringement lawsuit alleging that Discovery’s founder, John S. Hendricks, invented and patented a Kindle-like e-book delivery system back in the 1990s.

Discovery hasn’t sought an injunction, but simply seeks compensation. They have not (yet, at any rate), sued Sony or other e-book device manufacturers or service providers. That includes the inventors of the Rocket Book, the putative mother of all e-books, which has been around for eleven years.

What took Discovery so long to file its suit? That will undoubtedly come out in the wash, so watch these pages for updates.

RC

In an earth-scorching fulmination including a denunciation of “my once-tough, beloved Guild – my UNION”, Harlan Ellison announced that he has launched a lawsuit against CBS-Paramount, Inc. and Writers Guild of America. Papers filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California cite “breach of the duty of fair representation” and “breach of the Collective Bargaining Agreement”.

The specific issues are failure to account for and pay licensing and publication revenues resulting from publication by Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, divisions of Paramount, of a paperback trilogy that Ellison alleges is a “knock-off” of his famous Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever; and the failure of the Guild to support his complaints or take action against Paramount. He seeks unspecific damages from Paramount, but because he remains a loyal member of the Guild he is asking for only one dollar from the union. However, he also seeks “a judicial determination as to whether the WGA is doing what its stated purpose has been since day-one! To fight and negotiate for him and other writers.”

Ellison reserves the full measure of his ire for Paramount:

“The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who ‘have more important things to worry about,’ who’ll have their assistant get back to you, who don’t actually read or create, who merely ‘take’ meetings, and shuffle papers – much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams – they refuse even to notice…until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you’ve made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars…from OUR labors…just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters.”

And that’s just for warmups. As long as you’re prepared to confront both barrels of his 12-gauge invective, you can read the complete text of his press release here.

The City on the Edge of Forever is a poignant love story that takes the viewer back to 1930s America. 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. It became the classic Star Trek episode, winning the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay and the 1967 Hugo Award (the only teleplay ever to do so!). It was also ranked as one of the”100 Greatest Television Episodes of All Time” by TV Guide.

E-Reads has published the original teleplay of The City on the Edge of Forever as Ellison intended it to be aired. The author’s introductory essay (expanded by 15,000 words) reveals all of the details of what Ellison describes as a “fatally inept treatment” of his creative work.

Ellison is determined to have his day in court. Read his screenplay, introduction, and the description of his lawsuit and you can vicariously serve on the jury.

RC

The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times (Sunday, May 15th) carries an absolutely blood-freezing contribution by Mark Danner. Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, managed to get his hands on a report prepared by the Red Cross after a unit of the humane organization visited Guantánamo late in 2006 to review the prison’s interrogation procedures. Its report was given in strictest secrecy to the CIA.

“A short time ago,” Danner writes, “this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.” Tales From Torture’s Dark World is a condensed version of that NYRB article adapted for the Times.

That the barbaric methods used to interrogate the prisoners, authorized at the highest levels of the US government, border on atrocity will be self-evident to anyone who who has a heart (Dick Cheney excepted). But what I wondered as I read it is whether the Red Cross’s report would ever have come to light without the investigative spirit and courage of Danner and the publications that sponsored him. Though abstracts of his report will appear on countless blogs, would any of them have been willing to invest their own resources to initiate the kind of probe he undertook? It’s one thing for bloggers to tread the path blazed by pioneers, but would any of them have the guts to break the story and risk prosecution or harassment?

I don’t think so.

I won’t try to match the eloquence of those who have appealed for humanitarian treatment of combatants and political prisoners. Nor can I judge the guilt or innocence prisoners from whom confessions were extracted by the cruelest forms of coercion. “From everything we know,” Danner writes, “many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be ‘brought to justice,’ as President Bush vowed they would be.”

No, the reason I’m writing this is to remind you that truth and openness, the pillars on which western civilization rest, depend on newspapers and magazines as well as book publishers such as those publishing these revelations. We also depend on writers like Danner to interpret those revelations and place them in a moral context such as this one:

“The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured – and have already done so at Guantánamo – means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which ‘torture doesn’t work.’ The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.”

This website has carried many items about the efforts of print publishers to arrest their sickening financial freefall. Some of these ideas are viable and some are not. The issues underlying the rescue of publishers caught up in a devastating paradigm shift are complex and challenging. But we have to find a solution.

Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must – find a way to preserve it.

Richard Curtis