Online Piracy Report Form

In order to report an incident of piracy (unauthorized publication) of our books, please provide the information below. One form should be used per website (for example, you may include all titles or multiple posting of your titles that appear on that same website, but please complete a separate form for each individual website). HBG is only authorized to send take down notices for works where we control the rights; if the pirated work or infringement is of an edition we don’t control (like a translated edition), the foreign publisher authorized for that language is the proper party to send take down notices. Please send the completed request forms to piracy@hbgusa.com. To ensure accuracy of URLs, where possible, please copy and paste URLs directly from your browser address bar.

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E-book sales stats for the first quarter of 2009 are in, and we’re running out of superlatives. Trade sales were close to $26 million, exceeding last year’s Q1 by 131%. In one month alone – March ’09 – the $10 million in sales matched the total for the first three months of 2008.

The true sales numbers may be even higher than the above chart indicates. Michael Smith, Executive Director of IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) reminds us that:

• This data represents United States revenues only
• This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
• This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade
• publishers
• This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
• The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
• The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices”
• The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

RC

It only took a decade for titles printed on demand to exceed titles printed in traditional offset, but Jim Milliott of Publishers Weekly confirms it.

Out of 560,626 new and revised books published in the US in 2008, POD’s edged traditional by a score of 285,384 to 275,232.

In fact, POD increased so rapidly – 132% in a year – it actually lapped traditional printing on the racetrack. But wait – it gets better! “The jump in on-demand output in 2008 followed on even bigger increase in 2007 when production skyrocketed 462%.” writes Milliott. “Since 2002, production of on-demand titles has soared 774% compared to a 126% increase in traditional titles.”

Milliott cites Kelly Gallagher, vice-president of publisher services for Bowker, as indicating that improved printing technology is the reason for the soaring POD use. PW attributes the shift to self-publication as well as increased reliance on POD by online publishers. Which is it? We put our money on vanity.

RC

A kaiju is marching from Japan to the West, and the Kindle, Sony and other black and white e-book readers are in danger of being trampled. Call the monster Colorzilla.

For instance…

We recently wondered whether Rupert Murdoch was “ready to get e-ink on his fingers.” It increasingly looks like he is, and what’s more it will be colored ink. Gizmodo’s John Herman reports that “Rupert Murdoch, News Corp potentate and noted evil person, yesterday announced his company is ‘investing in a new device that has a bigger screen [than the Kindle], [and] four colors,’ adding, “THE KINDLE MUST PERISH.”

We agree with Herman’s observation that “We’ll have to wait and see on this one, but probably not for too long – this is a guy who, for better or for worse, means what he says – and the Kindle is begging for some decent competition.” (The Informer’s headline was, Rupert Murdoch Investing In a Mysterious Color eBook Reader [It Runs On Human Blood]).

Why, you may ask, do we need color to read black type on a white page? Because, as we pointed out a while back (Watching Books), text displayed on a screen – even a bullet-paced thriller – can be boring to a generation of readers raised on color-saturated television and computer screens. Served up with color ads or videos, even dry textbooks will hold our attention. And don’t forget the new hybrids slouching toward your screen called vlogs and vooks – dramatized blogs and stories utilizing the full arsenal of modern media.

In the last year or two the push for a color e-reader screen has intensified. The first across the finish line was the Fujitsu Flepia which, despite its intimidating price ($1000) showed us the potential for books nestled in color.

At half the price is the Panasonic WordsGear. As reviewed on Technabob:

The WordsGear offers an amazingly sharp 5.6-inch TFT display with a 1024×600 pixel resolution (that’s about 211 pixels per inch.) This means reading small type should be no problem, and easy on the eyes. Thanks to a special touch sensitive grip, it’s designed to be controlled with a single hand, so you can even use it while standing up on the train or bus.

Since the display isn’t one of those electrostatic ones, it can also handle moving images, and cam play MPEG4 video clips. There’s also AAC and WMA audio playback, and you can listen to your tunes while reading. Content is stored on SD cards, providing plenty of expandability. The rechargeable battery should give you about 6 hours of reading on a single charge.

There’s a huge catalog of e-books for the device (all in Japanese, though) available from Saidoku. From what I can tell, you can load up your own PDF documents so you won’t be limited to Japanese content.

It’s worth clicking on the Panasonic WordsGear to see the video. Didn’t understand a syllable but it’s great fun. And that’s the point – color is fun! Even, paradoxically, black-on-white text.

I wonder if the Japanese devices have been compromised by lousy names. It’s hard to take an e-book named Flepia seriously. First of all, no one knows if it’s Fleh-pia or Flee-pia (it’s Fleh, I’m reliably told). Second of all, “Flepia” sounds like one of those junk fishes hauled up with a tuna catch. And WordsGear? Can you see yourself boasting about reading a book on your WordsGear?

No wonder Kindle is enjoying so much success. Whether or not it’s a great e-book reader, it sounds like one.

RC

In the late fifties and sixties, Greenwich Village was the quirkiest, most charming, jazzy, eccentric and urban of environments, the center of all that was both quaint and “cool”: brownstones and beatniks, coffeehouses and college students, folksingers and freethinkers, poets and “prophets.” Into this fascinating mix of cultural archetypes came a young rabbi, Harvey M. Tattelbaum, who became known as the Village Rabbi of the Village Temple.

The spirit of Sholom Aleichem infuses his Tales of the Village Rabbi, a touching and laugh-out-loud funny memoir of his tenure at a small synagogue in the heart of Greenwich Village. Though his years in this magical place were productive and soul-filling, rabbinical training hadn’t exactly prepared him for the bikers, thieves, ex-cons, eccentric old ladies, drug-users, cleavage-baring brides and other Village denizens he encountered while serving the congregants of his spirited little temple.

Rabbi Tattelbaum shares his insider’s tales-both downtown and uptown-of wayward weddings (and funerals), contentious temple boards, irreverent interfaith shenanigans, heartaches and triumphs. But the Tales also reveal a deep personal struggle with some of the most profound philosophical problems of ancient and modern religion and are filled with a warm, humane and rational approach to spirituality and religious meaning.

RC

The other day we received our first e-catalog from a publisher and we not only lived to tell the tale, we actually liked it. Though the digital revolution in the book industry has happily reached a tipping point, a lot of grouchy twentieth century old timers have stubbornly drawn the line at emailed catalogs. Here’s what I recently muttered on the subject:

Another capital-intensive practice on the chopping block for a number of publishers is paper catalogues, and though we’re all trying to enter the digital age unflinchingly, the disappearance of catalogues will be more wrenching than many other uprootings. Catalogues have long been the most familiar tool for introducing the bookstore trade to publishers’ front- and backlists. They are not merely informational and often beautiful but they are a publisher’s face to the world, its very identity. Even the spelling of “catalogue”, despite Microsoft spellcheck’s insistence on dropping the “ue”, bespeaks a stubborn and beloved tradition.

Holding out for paper catalogs is kind of like die-hard Southerners flying the Confederate flag in their front yards. It’s a losing battle. Catalogs are going E whether we like it or not, and the Visigoths who spell it “catalog” have won the day.

The one we received from Perigee, a division of Penguin’s Putnam group, is handsome, colorful, informative, and easily navigable. The only problem is technical. The size of the PDF file sent to me was more than 6 MB. That can strain some older computers, get snagged by filters or push the dial on some inboxes close to the Full mark. The alternative is for booksellers and other interested parties to visit the publisher’s website and proceed to the catalog links. We did so and invite you to do so too. Click here, then click on the “catalogs” tab and scroll down to the various Penguin divisions. You can then view a catalog online or download it as a zip file.

Some files are larger than others and because the Perigee catalog is bundled with those of other divisions it weighs in at a hefty 114 MB; the zip is almost as big at 106 megs. Publishers will have to find ways to keep file sizes down. If an e-catalog requires too much time to load it will defeat its raison d’etre. For a busy bookseller, two or three minutes of watching a progress bar on a computer is as much time as it used to take to browse an entire paper catalog.

In time these issues will be resolved and as the industry grows accustomed to the new format, the advantages of e-catalogs will make themselves abundantly manifest; we’ll see video, audio, hotlinks galore and countless other bells and whistles. E-catalogs are cost effective and so much friendlier to the environment than their paper forebears. Indeed, Perigee’s catalog was inspired by one of the publisher’s own books, Green, Greener, Greenest by Lori Bongiorno.

Note that I spelled catalog in the contemporary style. But I secretly thought catalogue. Twentieth century habits die hard.

Richard Curtis

Volume by autobiographical volume, E-Reads is bringing out e-book editions of many beloved Tristan Jones accounts of life at sea. The latest is Seagulls in My Soup, a hilarious collection of adventures by a master story teller. Join Jones aboard his converted lifeboat cruising the Balearic coast with his one-eyed, three-legged dog Nelson and a prim Bishop’s sister named Sissie. Oh – and stay belowdecks when the machineguns open fire.

After a boyhood at sea and a young manhood dodging U-boats in the North Atlantic in World War II, Jones succeeded in setting a number of sailing records, then retired to write about them. For the last few years of his life, he retired to Phuket, Thailand aboard his cruising trimaran. He was as salty as a sailor can be, and an incomparable spinner of yarns.

Read an excerpt of Seagulls in My Soup here, then download the e-book. E-Reads has ten of Tristan Jones’s memoirs in e-book format - get them all.

If you’d like to read a personal account of my years as Tristan’s literary agent, you can access it here.

RC

Here’s a trick question. Do you think that books printed on demand are tangible merchandise? That they are no different from traditionally printed books?

It’s natural to think they are, but you might find it helpful instead to think of them as a form of digital book even though they are delivered by UPS instead of by your Internet service provider.

Because the trade publishing industry is in the doldrums we tend to think the book printing industry is suffering too. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I’ve contended again and again, there’s nothing wrong with the book business that can’t be cured by distributing books a different way. And that’s why I believe print on demand is the salvation of the industry.

This is admittedly a pretty extravagant declaration, but it’s supported by some statistics reported in an interview, conducted by Liz Thompson for Bookbrunch, with David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world. (As a matter of disclosure, LSI is E-Reads’ printer.) Taylor stated that LSI has printed 70 million books in the decade since POD was introduced, and its facilities in Tennessee and Pennsylvania hold about a million digital files. The business has “grown 20% to 30% in the last six months,” he said. LSI prints, binds and ships 10,000 copies a day on machines that run around the clock. In Britain, the firm is building a facility the size of an English football pitch.

Just as the current recession has laid bare the weakness of a traditional book distribution model based on the returnability of merchandise – with return rates soaring deep into the double-digits – it has also revealed the strength of an on-demand system with a negligible return rate.

“The recession,” Taylor told his interviewer, “is focusing publishers’ minds on cash, on the amount of inventory they have sitting in warehouses, on the cost of transporting stock. Most global publishers in the academic and STM [scientific, technical and medical] markets are saying they want to get out of inventory, and some pretty radical discussions are now taking place which will allow publishers to do just that. Believe me, it’s an exciting time to be part of the business.”

Among the radical solutions to the inventory problem is the creation of digital warehouses. These are in essence a network of servers containing vast archives of POD files linked to Espresso printers, miniaturized machines that can print and bind paperback books in under 10 minutes. Someone called them ATMs for books, but while the logical place for them is bookstores there’s no reason why Espressos could not be set up in facilities not necessarily book related (we half-jokingly suggested a bagel shop).

Certainly one place such networks could be set up is Third World countries, says Thompson, “which have none of the infrastructure of western publishing in place (warehouses, distribution companies) and where building it would not, at this point, make much sense.”

In short, says Liz Thompson, David Taylor “believes that far from the being dead, ‘or even slightly wounded’, digital technology is powering a genuine revolution in so-called traditional publishing.”

To witness the revolution, watch this video of an Espresso producing a book in front of your eyes. Order your book, buy yourself a cup of (liquid) espresso and by the time you’ve consumed it, your book will be ready.

Perhaps it will become apparent why, in 2005, Amazon.com acquired a modest little print on demand operation called BookSurge, and why, three years later, Amazon launched an aggressive campaign to promote its POD services to publishers. Though Amazon’s is the quintessentially modern book retailing operation in the history of the world, a number of underlying brick and mortar functions – notably, some 12 million square feet of warehouses – compromise its efficiency and profitability. In The Nine Gazillion Pound Gorilla Bares Its Fangs, a blog posted at the time, I wrote:

If Amazon is capable of printing books on demand, they will no longer have to carry any physical books in their warehouses at all! They simply have to load the files of Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, and every other publisher onto their server and print all of their books – frontlist as well as backlist – on demand. It would not only be a huge savings for Amazon in terms of warehouse space – it would be a huge savings for the publishers, too: they all would eliminate printing, warehouse, and freight costs at a stroke.

That all middlemen are impediments in a digital world is bedrock truth. As stupendous as Amazon is, it is nevertheless a middleman between book publishers and book buyers. The key to disintermediating that function is print on demand. Amazon’s 2008 foray in this arena was only the first skirmish. You can expect the company to continue seeking a large share of the POD business currently enjoyed by Lightning Source.

Richard Curtis

The Telnarians – their vast, corrupt empire spans galaxies, ruling by terror. But the souls of true men will not be forever chained. A heroic tide is rising and a warrior born to lead the barbarian horde against the corruption and brutality of their masters.

This is the universe of John Norman’s Telnarian Trilogy, a gripping science fiction series filled with interplanetary adventure, rebellion and gladiatorial combat by the author of E-Reads’ bestselling Gorean Saga. The books were published in the early 1990s and eventually went out of print. E-Reads has rescued them and brings them back to fans in all their classic splendor.

In the first novel, The Chieftain, a peasant thrown into the arena to satisfy the blood-lust of effete spectators turns the tables and slaughters his human and animal foes, winning his freedom as a full-fledged gladiator. Employed as a kind of circus performer to slay merely to amuse the crowd, he seizes an opportunity to rise up against his cruel masters – and mistresses, for one of them is the beautiful courtier who ordered his execution.

From The Chieftain to The Captain to the capstone novel, The King, the series builds in violence as the stakes grow higher and higher. The trilogy is immediately available for download, and paperback volumes are imminent. We’ll let you know the moment they show up on Amazon.

E-Reads is in the process of publishing the complete works of John Norman, and the Telnarian Trilogy is a major step in completing the collection. Keep an eye peeled on these pages for news of more vintage Norman books, including some surprises.

Is one of them a 28th volume in the Gorean Saga? Well, there are rumors to that effect…

RC

Every reader cherishes a fantasy of meeting a beloved author. Few ever realize this dream except, perhaps, to shake the author’s hand at a rushed and crowded bookstore autograph session. Yet, even such ephemeral encounters are forever replayed in our mind’s eye as we lovingly recall the pressure of the hand, the smile of appreciation, the inflection of the voice, the two or three words uttered by our idol’s lips, directed exclusively at us and no one else. We gaze and gaze and gaze at the inscription as if it were on the verge of quickening.

Imagine, then, what it must feel like to write a fan letter to an author and have him contact you to tell you he would like you to become his literary agent. But in fact, that is precisely how I came to represent Tristan Jones. Click here to read the full account.

E-Reads is in the process of publishing many of his popular adventures in e-book format. For a complete list, click here.

Richard Curtis