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

In July of 2008, about nine months after the first season of Mad Men ended, Lionsgate, the hit television show’s producer, released the DVD. It not only carried all 13 episodes but a number of special features as well. Among them were audio commentaries on each episode; a “featurette” exploring the world of Mad Men; a documentary called The Desire of the American Dream, described as “featuring the 1960′s creative revolution in media”; “Pictures of Elegance” a photo gallery with commentaries from the costume, hair and production designers; another featurette called “Scoring Mad Men“; and a Mad Men Music Sampler.

Some leading publishing executives must have watched that or some other DVD and had an “Aha!” moment. Why couldn’t you enhance e-book reprints the same way that film and television studios enhance the DVD rereleases of theatrical movies or television series?

That idea seems to be taking hold. Jack McKeown, a founder of book publisher and distributor Perseus Group, recently discussed this idea, citing remarks by HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray: “Publishers would do well to seize the high ground here by offering enhanced e-book editions, accompanied by robust internet-focused marketing campaigns to further distinguish their e-book launches.”

And Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal reports that Macmillan will be releasing special e-book editions of key hardcover books, but with an interesting twist: they will actually be sold for a higher price than the hardcovers! “The special editions, which will include author interviews and other material, such as reading guides, will carry a list price slightly higher than the hardcover edition. (Hardcover books typically list for at least $25, while e-book versions of best sellers can go for as little as $9.99.) The new e-books will go on sale on the same day as the hardcover. After 90 days, the special edition will be replaced by a standard e-book.”

It should come as no surprise that the idea for enhanced e-books was introduced, or at least articulated, last March by Mike Shatzkin, the closest thing our business has to a Nostradumus. In a two part posting he laid out everything a publisher needs to know and do to maximize its e-book resources.

One of the key benefits of the medium is economy. Enhanced e-books “present the opportunity to deliver additional content and features to consumers with no additional run-on production cost,” Shatzkin explains. “Traditional printed books cost something additional for every extra page we put into them; e-books don’t.

“An enhanced ebook,” he points out, “can be an infinite number of things, and probably will become dozens, if not hundreds, of different things over time…The tools include internal linking, external linking, embedded video and audio, additional text-and-illustration content, and even software utilities.” You can read details in Part 1 and Part 2 of Shatzkin’s oracular posts.

By glamorizing their e-book reprints with author interviews, special prefaces by guests or by the authors themselves, audios and videos, previews of the author’s new book, etc., publishers will go far to pacify complaints by fans irritated about having to wait. (See Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Reprints.)

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal.

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early ’90s Publisher’s Weekly ran literary agent Richard Curtis’s end-of-the-year summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights and lowlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, “Merger, He Wrote,” (1986), “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine” (1989) and “Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off” (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with “The Year of the Platform,” which boasted such lines as,

Are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

Last year’s effusion, “The Coming of the POD People,” had this memorable doggerel:

Agents now submit their schlock
By means of email as dot-doc.

In 2009′s poem, “The Yr of the Tweet“, Curtis writes,

It’s fine for paradigms to shift
As long as authors don’t get stiffed.

Click here to read it in its entirety, and discover how Curtis actually found a rhyme for “Shatzkin”. Verses for prior years as well as his prose spoofs are collected in The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires.

We know there’s an aerosol to make your Nook smell like a new book, a musty old one, or crunchy bacon. Now there’s a way to make your Kindle look like a copy of the New Yorker.

Today we were solicited by Conde Nast Publications, publisher of the New Yorker, inviting us to take advantage of a 20%-off offer to buy a jacket for our Kindle utilizing iconic cover art from the grand old magazine. The publisher is co-opping with the manufacturer of the covers, M-Edge.

M-Edge’s Kindle caddies solve a vexing problem we wrote about not long ago:

As the E-Book Era unfolds, you will never again be able to form an instant impression of a stranger from the book he or she is reading, or send a signal of your own. Why? Because, in Kaufman’s words, “for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’?” Kaufman describes the Kindle as “the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper.”

RC

While studying his beloved San Francisco through binoculars from his apartment window, horror writer Franz Westen is astonished to see a mysterious figure waving at him from a hilltop two miles away. He walks to Corona Heights and looks back at his building – and discovers the same figure waving at him from his apartment window! He soon finds himself caught in a century-spanning curse that may have destroyed Clark Ashton Smith and Jack London.

The book is Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber, and it was 1978 winner of the World Fantasy Award. E-Reads is happy to offer it as an e-book. The print version, paired with another Leiber horror classic, Conjure Wife, is available from Tor.

“In today’s terms this is horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project. A story permeated by a sense of menacing creepiness” says one Amazon.com reviewer.

Fritz Leiber is considered one of science fiction’s legends. Author of a prodigious number of stories and novels, many of which were made into films, he is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won awards too numerous to count including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died in 1992.

Publication of Our Lady of Darkness brings to 13 the number of works by Leiber published by E-Reads. Visit our Leiber page to see them all and order any that may be missing from your collection.

In Greg Bear’s new futuristic FBI thriller Mariposa, the world just keeps getting tougher and more complicated. America teeters on the edge of bankruptcy because of crushing foreign debt and an apparent savior, The Talos Corporation, delivers training for soldiers and security forces around the world, logistical support and badly-needed troops economically. But there’s a sinister hidden cost. The three rookie FBI agents who survived the challenges portrayed in Quantico are drawn back together in an alliance against a deadly challenge for which no one seems prepared. The code name is “Mariposa”, and only a desperate combination of misfits and survivors can combat a threat spelling nothing less than the collapse of American democracy.

E-Reads is happy to bring you the e-book edition of Mariposa. For those who prefer to read the print edition, click here. If you want to read the novel that launched this futuristic FBI thriller series, you can buy the e-book of Quantico here or the print edition here.

And for a menu of eighteen unforgettable novels by this award-winning master of science fiction, visit Greg Bear’s page on E-Reads.

RC

About Greg Bear

Greg Bear, author of over 25 books, which have been translated into 17 languages, has won science fiction’s highest honors and is considered the natural heir to Arthur C. Clarke. The recipient of two Hugos and four Nebulas for his fiction, he has been called “the best working writer of hard science fiction” by The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Many of his novels, such as Darwin’s Radio, are considered to be this generations’ classics. He is married to Astrid Anderson, daughter of science fiction great Poul Anderson, and they are the parents of two children, Erik and Alexandria. His most recent thriller novel, Quantico, was published in 2007. He has since published a new, epic SF novel, City at the End of Time.

Last fall our piece about Britain’s outrageous libel laws (Can’t Sue for Libel in US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World) got a lot of attention, and perhaps some of the howls of horror it provoked were heard across the pond. “Embarrassed by London’s reputation as ‘a town called sue’ and by unusually stinging criticisms in American courts and legislatures,” writes New York Times‘s sarah Lyall, “British lawmakers are seriously considering rewriting England’s 19th-century libel laws.”

What the beef? “English libel law is the opposite of America’s in many ways,” says Lyall. “In the United States, the plaintiff, or accuser, must prove that the statement in question was false; public officials must also prove that it was made maliciously, with ‘reckless disregard’ for the truth.” Whereas in England, “the burden of proof rests on the defendant, whose statements are presumed false and who has to establish that they are true.”

As a result, authors and publishers have been intimidated from writing anything that might get them hauled into a British court. In one case a handful of copies of an American book made their way into England but that was enough to get the author sued. The costs alone can be ruinous, and damages? Don’t ask! “A protracted case could bankrupt an organization,” said one victim. “Even if a plaintiff is completely in the wrong, they could break you.”

Feel your blood boiling? There’s now hope: read Britain, Long a Libel Mecca, Reviews Laws by Sarah Lyall.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Publishers are fighting the last war, but they’d better turn their heads forward if they don’t want to lose the next one.

The notice served by Random House to authors and agents, vowing to protect its backlist from predatory e-book developers, focused so much attention on previously published books that just about everybody took their eyes off an infinitely larger issue and an infinitely larger prize: the future.

When we look back at the fireworks triggered by Random House’s action we will see it as a noisy squabble over a relatively small number of contracts with ambiguous definitions of the word “book”. Very old books have entered the public domain beyond the reach of proprietary publishers. Very new ones, on the other hand, dating from around 1990, carry explicit language defining e-rights that no buccaneer would dream of challenging. That leaves a body of post-World War II titles predating the e-book revolution, and in a great many cases their contracts have just enough references to things like “information storage and retrieval rights” and “no competing editions” to intimidate most would be poachers. There may not be that many books worth fighting over, and certainly not that many worth suing over.

But there is one body of books that publishers will have to fight for if they are to avoid calamity: the ones that have not yet been published. Events of the last few weeks have introduced a concept so terrifying to book publishers that they have refused to think about it: the separation of e-books from the suite of rights that they have taken as God-given for centuries. Who can blame them for living in denial? Deprive publishers of e-rights and they become mere printers, game set match.

We don’t have to look at ancient history to see how another right that publishers took for granted was pried out of their clutches, and that’s audio. For decades “audio” was a sleepy little curiosity that no one felt worth fighting over. For many of us, it meant a boxed set of Caedmon records of Dylan Thomas reading his play Under Milkwood in 1953. But as recording media evolved from vinyl to tape to CD to streaming, the audio business became a billion dollar one, and authors and agents began demanding separation of those rights from the fundamental package just as they had done early in the 20th century with movie and television rights.

The turmoil of the last few weeks, capped by the dramatic announcement by business book author Stephen Covey of his intention to sell his e-book rights to Amazon, should make it crystal-clear that severance of those rights from a publisher’s franchise is now a viable option for authors. At the moment it is an option for big-name stars only, but don’t so many revolutions begin on the backs of the mighty? As we recently wrote, agents have been sitting on the sidelines waiting to hear the words “e-book” and “advance” used in the same sentence. Now they smell money. A recent all-expenses-paid junket by agents to Amazon’s headquarters may have had some influence on these developments (See Why Don’t Agents Want to Play? Amazon Flies a Bunch to Seattle to Find Out).

The implications of separation of e-rights are profound and for publishers they must be excrutiatingly threatening, for their biggest nightmare is that Amazon will become a publisher. Now that Amazon is a bidder for electronic rights, that day has arrived.

It must be said that publishers have brought some of this on themselves by pegging the e-book royalty rate at 25% of net proceeds or even less. There are enough independent e-book outfits offering 50% (including – full disclosure – E-Reads) that it was only a matter of time before authors and agents did the math and came to the conclusion that 50% was twice as large as 25%.

The nightmare is out of the box. Is there any way for publishers to get it back in and contain the threat? The answer is yes, if they are willing to bite the 50% royalty bullet. Earlier this week in connection with Random House’s dictum, the Authors Guild urged that very condition. Random House, said the Guild, should “start offering a fair royalty for those rights.” Their statement went on to say:

Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We’re confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That’s beginning to change.

While it’s well and good for publishers to pore over their old contracts, they really need to examine the boilerplate in their current ones, and where it says “25%” they should consider amending it to 50%. Otherwise they may see their digital book rights calve off irretrievably like glaciers falling into the sea.

Richard Curtis

For years we’ve been wondering when schools would figure out that any e-book smaller than a tablet would simply not be feasible for the student market. Anne Eisenberg of the New York Times writes about an effort by one company, enTourage Systems, to produce a two-screen tablet-sized device called the “eDGe”.

It’s supposed to be released in February. It will sell for $490, not bad as prices for tablets are concerned. The device’s name comes close to falling into our Dumb Names category but at least we understand we’re supposed to pronounce it “Edge”. That’s better than the Que or Cool-er, neither of which we’re sure we know how to pronounce.* We do know how to pronounce Nook but that’s another story.

In any event this two-screen e-book reader will carry text on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other “to render graphics like science animations in color,” explains Eisenberg. “The e-reader screen is used with a stylus that can underline or highlight text, take notes in the margin, pull up a blank piece of e-paper for solving math problems, or touch a link for a video of a chemical interaction that is then displayed on the LCD screen.” In other words, it works like a tablet is supposed to work, except it comes in two parts held together by a hinge. It’s hard to say how seriously we’re supposed to take the eDGe – Eisenberg’s column is called “Novelties”.

eDGe is definitely a step in the right direction and might be what California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had in mind when he promoted replacing paper textbooks with e- books (see Hasta La Vista, Textbooks). But we’re waiting for a true one-screen tablet such as that in development by Microsoft. And if we have a choice we’ll hold out for the rolltop we demo’d in the fall, a device so radically brilliant that I lost my cool and exclaimed, “I Want One Today!” Unfortunately, it appears to be a theoretical design, not a prototype. You should check it out anyway because it shows what an innovative designer can do when he let’s his imagination soar.

Read Eisenberg’s piece here.

*Just a footnote to our harping on dumb names. An anonymous commenter had made this shrewd observation on a recent posting on the subject: “Have you every tried to get a domain name for the Internet? Every word in every language has already been taken. If you have tried this before, you know what I’m talking about.

“Now add that frustration to the trademark search space. And then add in international trademarks and the resulting intersection leaves you with dumb names.

“That’s why today’s products are using these names: Hulu, Nook, TiVo, Blio, etc. It’s marketing that takes a nonsense word like Google and makes it a household word. The winners in the eBook space will do the same.”

Good point, Anonymous. I just wish the manufacturers of devices like the Cool-er and Que would give us a clue to pronouncing them. I have it anecdotally that they are pronounced “Cool-Ee-Arr” and “Cue” respectively. How much marketing would it have taken to tell us that much?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Help Wanted: Amazon Picker/Packer. Sturdy Sneakers a Must.

EW.com’s Popwatch picked up an item from Huffington Post linking to a job posting for holiday workers at an Amazon.com warehouse. Such jobs are known as picking and packing – that is, when a customer order comes in, you must proceed to the sector where that book is shelved, remove and prepare it for shipment.

Given the acres and acres of Amazon fulfillment centers (this one’s in Kansas) and the volume of orders, much of the task is automated, you may be sure. Nevertheless, according to EW.com, “You have to be able to walk the equivalent of 10 to 15 miles a day. A day!”

How about a sled with eight tiny reindeer?

RC