The other day we reported that Apple-watchers have taken to calling the imminent tablet The Unicorn because of all the magical properties being attributed to it – and because, of course, no one has seen it. If only there were a fly on the wall of Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, a fly with a particularly sensitive transmitter…

In fact we have one. It’s a company called Flurry Analytics. Flurry has developed tools that gather from app developers information about applications they are working on. Jenna Wortham, writing about Flurry in the New York Times, reports that “Flurry can generate reports about the location of an application’s users, for example, or how long it took a user to complete a game level.”

It turns out that Flurry picked up some feedback from about 50 devices on or around the Cupertino campus and came to some conclusions about what we’re going to find under the hood of Apple’s tablet when we finally get our hands on one for a test drive.

Check Flurry’s chart below and you’ll see that the top three apps downloaded from Cupertino are for games, entertainment and news/books, followed by lifestyle, utilities, music, photography, travel, finance, social networking, weather and miscellaneous.

That games and entertainment are the # 1 and #2 apps should not surprise us, especially when one considers that the tablet’s larger screen will enable more than one user to play games on it. But the third one, news and books, raises an eyebrow in view of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s declaration that nobody reads anymore. It sounds as if people are going to be reading newspapers and illustrated books big time on the iSlate, Unicorn or whatever it’s called.

For more speculations on the Apple tablet, read Jenna Wortham’s A Playland for Apps in a Tablet World. The speculation should end later today when Apple’s formal announcement puts us all out of our misery. But if that Flurry fly on the wall of Apple’s lab is transmitting accurate information, Apple’s announcement should be anticlimactic.

Richard Curtis

Ladies and gentlemen, start your crystal balls.

Digital Book World, a conference devoted to exploring the future of publishing both digital and conventional (if there is any such thing anymore) begins today with guru Mike Shatzkin as its driving organizer and master of ceremonies. It will take place at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in New York City, January 26th and 27th.

The schedule is studded with publishing notables who have led the industry’s charge into cyberspace, but it will be attended by professionals who have to apply the thrilling advances in technology to a business still mired in another century, arguably the 18th.

But “Digital Book World isn’t just about strategies, it’s also about the network,” says the event’s website. “Because of our focus on consumer publishing, our speakers and attendees represent publishers of all sizes and niches – from HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House to Tor, Chelsea Green, National Geographic and Ellora’s Cave – as well as literary agents and other allied professionals, and vendors with an interest in the future of consumer publishing.”

Among the highlights are:

• An overview of Google Editions
• “Back-Loaded Book Deals” with Roger Cooper, Bob Miller and several agents
• “The Next Generation of eBooks”
• “Tomorrow’s Book Contract: New Language and Provisions to Reflect New Conditions” hosted by yours truly

A big draw on Wednesday will be “The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How it Will Affect the Business Model” moderated by Sara Nelson of Oprah’s Book Club. Her panelists will be agents Gail Hochman, Scott Waxman, Brian DeFiore, and Wendy Keller of Keller Media.

A spectral but influential presence will be Apple, which will be announcing details of its tablet on the afternoon of the conference’s second day, and not a few attendees will be glancing at their blackberries to learn details of the breaking news. Ironically, that will happen around the time of a concluding statement by Guy LeCharles Gonzales of Digital Book World entitled “The Future of Publishing is Bright”.

You can click here to visit the conference website and here to view the schedule.

Richard Curtis

When Kassia Krozser referred to the forthcoming Apple tablet as the “Apple Unicorn” I emailed her to ask if she knew something that no civilian outside of Apple knows. Or was it a joke? If it was a joke it was a damn good one.

It’s a joke. Someone started referring to the tablet as a Unicorn because no one had ever seen it but everyone was ascribing magical properties to it.

I fell for it because “Unicorn” happens to be a splendid name for an e-book reader, especially compared to the litany of dumb ones we have been reciting for the last year or two. “The name has, oddly (or not), found traction in all sorts of media,” Kassia writes, “and there’s even a Unicorn hashtag on Twitter.”

Of course, if the name of Apple’s tablet truly turns out to be Unicorn the joke would be on Apple. But right now, Las Vegas money is strongly behind “iSlate”. Forty-eight hours or so from now we’ll all know.

Richard Curtis

When Galley Cat invited me to make some predictions for the coming decade, I conjectured that sometime in the near future we would see the merger of a major retailer and a major publisher. Here was my reasoning: “A combined publisher/retailer solves many problems for both.The retailer owns the content and doesn’t have to pay a premium for it. The publisher does not have to pay a premium to distribute its books. There would be huge efficiencies of manufacturing and distribution.”

I’ve had about a month to think about what I said, and I want to revise it. The efficiencies of a retailer/publisher combine would not merely be huge. They would be decisive. If you don’t believe it, ask Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

In 2003 Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling Publishing, described at the time as “one of the top 25 publishers in America and the industry’s leading publisher of how-to books.” Publishers were gravely concerned, and they had every reason to be. Barnes & Noble’s own titles were like a supermarket’s house brand, often undercutting the prices of outside purveyors.

And now Amazon is a publisher too. It started with its Encore program aimed at identifying overlooked books and authors. That was followed by the creation of a service called CreateSpace aimed at self-published authors. And now Amazon has begun publishing mainstream authors like Stephen King and recently acquired Stephen (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®) Covey for the Kindle.

The potential for mischief created by such combines was cogently articulated a few years ago by Morris Rosenthal and I urge you to read it. In essence, the savings generated by dissolving the barrier between seller and buyer enable the combine to lower prices below – sometimes far below – those charged by publishers that do not own their own retail branch. To state the case as simply as possible: Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, the two most powerful retailers in the book business, have become competitors of the very publishers they serve.

Though these retailers have no qualms about becoming publishers, publishers on the other hand are terrified of becoming retailers for fear of provoking the wrath of their key accounts – B&N and Amazon! When publishers do dip a timid toe in the water and try to sell their books direct to the consumer, they offer them at full list price, which cannot possibly compete with the deeply discounted prices charged by B&N and Amazon. Yet, if they wanted to, publishers could sell their books directly to the public at 40% discount or higher and thus level the playing field.

The solution? To survive, to remain competitive, publishers may have no choice: they must either become retailers or end up being acquired by them.

At this moment Borders, one of the best and most popular bookstore chains in the business, is in a life and death struggle to remain viable. If a publisher were smart it would rescue Borders and go into the retail business.

Retailers, I said a while ago (see Direct Sales: Publishing’s Last Stand), are intermediaries in a world that is rapidly disintermediating. As big as they are, retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon are vulnerable to market forces bent on eliminating middlemen, and that’s precisely why they have begun publishing books. The digital revolution demands a direct relationship between content provider and consumer. Merging a publisher and a bookstore like Borders would bring both struggling enterprises a little closer to that direct relationship, to profitability and to competitiveness.

Do I hear any bids?

Richard Curtis

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has written more than a dozen novels, one of which, The Healer’s War, won a Nebula Award in 1989. She has collaborated with Dragonriders of Pern author Anne McCaffrey to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series.

The Godmother puts a new twist in contemporary fantasy with the story of a fairy godmother who works in in a social-services agency in Seattle and has to handle contemporary renditions of such Grimm tales as Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and Cinderella. Scarborough’s fully realized settings and humor make The Godmother a thoroughly entertaining modern fantasy story.

Other Scarborough works available on E-Reads are the novel Song of Sorcery and a collection, Scarborough Fair and Other Stories.

RC

With the death of George Jellinek, reported earlier this week, the musical history book of the 20th century has closed. Born in Hungary 1919, his parents put him on the last ship carrying emigrees out of harm’s way as the Nazi fist clenched around the throat of Europe. The ship went to Cuba.

The story of Jellinek’s survival and the strange road that brought him from Havana to New York’s musical scene, where he became director of the city’s classical music station and eventually host of a long-running opera program, are chronicled in his book My Road to Radio And The Vocal Scene: Memoir of an Opera Commentator.

I was honored to represent Jellinek on publication of his erudite History through the Opera Glass. For all of us for whom he was a fixture on the radio – the charming, witty and unmistakeably continental voice of an era wiped out by the Second World War – his passing is profoundly saddening. Tributes paid to him over the radio use the same word again and again: George Jellinek was a gentleman.

Below, an all too streamlined summary of a rich life, taken from his autobiography:

Born in Ujpest, Hungary, in 1919, George Jellinek began his musical career playing violin with gypsies in the family’s garden restaurant. He spent his adolescence doing much the same, honing his talent and enriching his own musical education with frequent trips to the Hungarian Royal Opera House. But when Hitler and Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact in 1938, Jellinek’s quiet life was shattered. How the exiled teenager survived World War II, worked his way up from a poor Hungarian immigrant in Cuba and became one of the most important and influential musical administrators in New York is an unconventional but truly American success story.

This memoir documents the inspiring life of George Jellinek, beginning with his childhood in his beloved Hungary. The crisis of World War II soon invaded his life and, leaving behind his family and homeland, he fled west. Having been finally allowed to enter the United States, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, obligated to bear arms against the country of his birth. This ironic turn of events culminated in his firsthand role in the capture of Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of Hungary’s Hitlerite faction.

The latter half of the book reveals how music helped Jellinek piece back together his broken life in America. After rising to the post of musical director for radio station WQXR, he went on to become the producer and host of The Vocal Scene. His 36 years with that program established it as a revered fixture of New York’s opera life.

The epilogue documents the day on which Hungary’s president bestowed upon Jellinek the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.

RC

We devote acres of blogspace to e-books but do we really know what we’re talking about? A three-installment Book Industry Study Group survey will help us at last to speak knowledgeably.

In the first installment, the majority of the 556 who responded to the survey gave affordability as the principal reason for buying an e-book vs. the same book in print format. They also held shareability as an important factor. Searchability and environmental friendliness were secondary in their value system. They (especially males) were not big fans of e-books with Digital Rights Management (DRM), restrictive controls over content and devices. Yet their second favorite device for reading an e-book, after computers, was the Kindle, a closed DRM system.

One of the most intriguing findings is that “30% of print book buyers would wait up to three months to purchase the e-book edition of a book by their favorite author.” Though this contingent does not constitute a majority, it is substantial enough to reinforce the recently instituted policies by some publishers of holding back “e-prints” of their hardcover books in order to give the print editions some room to find their audience, maximize sales and have a shot at going on the bestseller list. At this point in time e-book sales do not count with those who make up key bestseller lists such as the New York Times‘s and Publishers Weekly‘s.

For more information and details of how the survey was conducted, click here.

Two more installments to come.

Richard Curtis

The Wall Street Journal has just realized something that writers have known for decades: publishers have stopped accepting submissions directly from authors, requiring them to submit through literary agents.

“Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction,” writes Katherine Rosman. “Film and television producers won’t read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.”

Despite these discouraging tidings, Rosman’s article The Death of the Slush Pile has some amusing, entertaining and even inspiring stories of successful books pulled out of the heap before publishers closed their doors on unsolicited submissions. And there are still a few exceptions to publishers hanging the Keep Out sign on their doors “One slush stalwart—The Paris Review—has college interns and graduate students in the magazine’s Tribeca loft-office read the 1,000 unsolicited works submitted each month,” says Rosman. “Each short story is read by at least two people. If one likes it and the other doesn’t, it is read by a third. Any submission that receives two “Ps” for “pass” as opposed to “R” for “reject” is read by an editor.”

Before submitting your story to The Paris Review, read Rosman’s kicker: “The literary journal publishes one piece from the slush pile each year. That leaves each unsolicited submission a .008% chance of rising to the top of the pile.”

Unfortunately, your odds are scarcely better with an agent. As I wrote elsewhere, shutting down the slush piles “didn’t lower the odds – it just shifted them from one pair of shoulders to another, and when the rejection-to-acceptance ratio turned out to be about the same for agents as it had been for publishers, around 20,000 to 1, the conditions were ripe for an author stampede. All that was needed was a less expensive means of indulging one’s vanity – er, excuse me: publishing one’s own books. The late 1990s provided it in the form of such modern miracles as print on demand, photoshop software and other other cheap and easy production and graphics programs. The stampede began.”

And there is no end in sight.

If you’re interested in the financial logic underlying publishers’ closing of slush piles, read Slush by the Numbers,” excerpted from my book How to Be Your Own Literary Agent.

Richard Curtis

Do twenty rumors add up to one truth? Maybe.

Like the blind men in the fable who try to infer the shape of an elephant by touching its body parts, countless Apple-watchers ranging from savvy geeks to clueless crackpots have been speculating on the nature of the iSlate tablet (including, by the way, the name itself). The difference is that the characters in the famous story actually had access to the elephant’s trunk, tail, ear and tusk, whereas the speculators haven’t even glimpsed the iSlate.

But a website called The Green Room has culled all the rumors and assembled them into an iSlate, or at least the tablet equivalent of the elephant. The composite they’ve constructed comes complete with callouts referring to each rumored component. It’s pictured left, but click here to see it full size and legibly. A fun feature is Green Room’s evaluation of the rumors ranging from highly likely to highly unlikely. Here are a few of those callouts with the URLs of the source of the gossip.

• 3D operating system navigation (very unlikely)
• Price around $1,000 (very likely)
• January 27 unveiling (very likely)
• 10” display (likely)
• Called iSlate (likely)
• Pixel Qi screen (very unlikely)
• OLED screen (unlikely)
• Multitouch version of iWork (likely)
• Interact with tablet using palms and fingers (likely)

The observation that interests us most is that the Pixel Qi screen is not a likely possibility. As we wrote recently (See Hybrids Work for Cars. Why Not for Screens?), Pixel Qi is a hybrid that alternates between battery-draining full color for applications like video, to battery-saving black and white for text reading. We had surmised that Pixel Qi might solve the problem of short battery life in the iSlate. But if The Green Room is right and Pixel Qi is a “very unlikely” feature of the iSlate – well, where does it leave us?

With a lot of questions, is where. They’ll be answered on January 27th – unless Apple has simply hired an auditorium to announce it’s installing new toilets in the executive washroom.

Okay, do you think you know the answers? If you do, Gizmodo is offering a free Apple tablet to whoever guesses the most features on the device (including the name). Here are the contest rules:

Fill out the survey before the Apple event, and whoever gets closest to having all the answers right is eligible to win a free Apple tablet—whatever it ends up being called—courtesy of us.

• If the final feature is not exactly like one of the answers we provided, we will pick the closest answer. If the feature is not in the answers, that question will be void, but the rest of the questions will still be valid towards winning.

• There is a reasonable chance that many people will get the correct answers. In the event that there are, all of those who made the cut will go into a drawing, from which we’ll pick a winner at random.

Richard Curtis
iSlate background image created by Fotoboer, graphic © 2010 tgr network.

Is an e-book a physical thing? Or is it virtual and without mass? An object or a file? And is there a different model for selling virtual than there is for selling physical?

We’re about to find out. Jeffrey Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has been in discussions, and possible negotiations, with HarperCollins over the terms of e-books to be carried on the soon-to-be released Apple tablet, which everyone is calling the iSlate until the official announcement on January 27th proves otherwise. It would appear however that Apple is discussing a similar agenda with other members of the so-called big six publishers (Simon & Schuster, Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan and HarperCollins).

Michael Cader, publisher of Publishers Lunch, has written an extensive analysis drawn from the molten news as it leaks out of so-called confidential discussions. “Apple,” writes Cader, “has agreed in principle to do business with publishers under what is called the agency model–as opposed to the wholesaling model currently in place for ebook sales and most physical book sales. In the agency model, the publisher is considered as keeping possession of the actual goods (the ebook files) and it pays a commission to its authorized selling partners. So the publisher sets the retail price of the ebooks, and the commissioned agents have no ability to change that price. Ebooks sold under the agency model would be offered to any established trading partners who agree to the commission and other particulars.”

Cader adds:

“Given that publishers, agents and even retailers have already skirmished over whether ebook sales are a traditional sale or a license, and given the completely different nature of selling access to a digital file versus a physical object, there’s plenty of room to argue that a new selling model is only logical and overdue.”

The implications of this development cannot be overstated, for it means restoration to publishers of control over the timing and pricing of e-books. It also means some pushback against Amazon, whose approach to pricing and simultaneous release of e-books has pretty much put publishers in a corner.

You can read the Wall Street Journal article here.

We’ve come a long way since Apple CEO Steven Jobs, referring to e-books, sneered “People don’t read anymore.” (See Will Steve Jobs Eat His Words with Ketchup, Mustard or Mayo?)

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.