Eric Engleman, in his Amazon Blog, writes that Kindle fans are punishing a publisher that has held back the Kindle version of a just-published book.

The book in question is Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilman, the juicy tell-all about the 2008 presidential campaign. Though it has generally garnered raves for its brilliant investigative reporting and jaw-dropping revelations, and indeed has received 59 five-star reviews on Amazon, it has also received no fewer than 119 one-star reviews, with scarcely any ratings in between the two poles. Why?

“The book has been deluged with one-star, negative reviews from people who are protesting publisher HarperCollins’ decision to delay the Kindle version to Feb. 23,” writes Engleman. “Those one-star reviews have contributed to a ho-hum average customer review rating of a 2.5 stars (out of 5). Customer reviews are an important factor for book sales on Amazon, and it will be interesting to see if the Kindle protests spread.”

You can read both the raves and the boo-hisses here, but as to the latter, they can be summed up by this one: “No Kindle version? No Sale!”

The wisdom of simultaneously publishing hardcover books and e-books was questioned at the end of last year by a number of publishing figures including literary agent Nat Sobel whose posting here sparked an outpouring of strong feelings on both sides of the issue. Now the strong feelings have spilled over to consumers. The “windowing” (delay) of e-book reprints may seem like sound publishing practice for many kinds of books, but a hot-gossipy and time-sensitive book like Game Change may be the exception to that rule.

Consumers may not consider, and certainly may not care about, sound publishing practice. But for HarperCollins, Game Change‘s publisher, there’s a solid economic reason for withholding the e-print. The hardcover lists at $27.99 on Amazon, discounted to $15.39. If it were available today on Kindle the price would undoubtedly be the standard $9.99 that Amazon is trying to impose on the book retail business. “Some in the publishing industry fear that Amazon’s standard $9.99 (or lower) for new release books on Kindle will create a ‘sticky’ price in consumers’ minds, dragging down the overall perceived value of books,” writes Engleman.

Richard Curtis

International Digital Publishing Forum reports that November e-book sales were $18.3 million, compared to sales for the prior November, $6.1 million. The leap is triple, and though we must not get jaded about these astonishing monthly postings, triple digit leaps have become routine with no end in sight.

IDPF 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”

Richard Curtis

Slush
(Excerpt from How to Be Your Own Literary Agent by Richard Curtis)

When the nation was younger, and publishing still known as the Gentleman’s Profession, most book publishers were happy to consider manuscripts submitted by unrepresented writers, and many a good book got published that way. But as publishing developed after World War II into big business, and literary agents rose to dominate the marketplace, publishers sharply veered away from unrepresented authors as significant sources of publishable material and began depending more and more heavily on agents to screen good properties from bad.

At length, the consolidation of the industry, aided by recessionary trends in the economy, completed the movement in that direction, and we are now at the point where very little unsolicited material is read by major trade-book publishers in the United States. For it is clearly cost-ineffective to retain editors to read “unagented” manuscripts when the ratio of acceptances to rejections is something on the order of one in ten thousand. (Unfortunately, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary does not yet recognize the verb “to agent,” but everyone in the business uses it, and so must you if you’re going to be doing your own . . . um . . . agenting.)

There are exceptions, but they only serve to prove the rule. Ordinary People by Judith Guest was plucked out of the unsolicited pile at Viking Press and went on to become a very big book and an even bigger movie. But according to the New York Times, it was also the first such manuscript accepted by Viking in twenty-seven years!

Manuscripts submitted to publishers by unrepresented authors are described by the depressing term slush, and slush they are, whether the work of a genius or the ravings of a lunatic. Insofar as any manuscript comes into a publishing company “over the transom” (uninvited), it falls under the official designation of Slush.

Although statistics are not available, I would guess that most trade publishers today do not read slush. They return it with printed rejection slips, frequently with a statement that they read material only if submitted by literary agents. As I say, the reasoning is cold-bloodedly economic. Assuming a publisher gets 5000 unagented manuscripts in a year (a figure I’m told is on the modest side), and a skillful editor can read and judge four every working day, and figure 225 working days a year, that’s less than 1000 manuscripts evaluated per editor per year. So you need four or five editors to plow through those 5000 manuscripts. Figure salaries for junior editors at this writing to be around $25,000 per annum, and you have an annual salary cost of $100,000 to $125,000 per year for the slush-pile staff. Then add fringe benefits and Social Security contributions. Recommended manuscripts must be read by senior editors, whose time must also be paid for. And what about the astronomical cost of returning all the rejected manuscripts whose authors have not included postage?

And so, if it is true that only one manuscript in thousands is worthy of acceptance by a publisher, you’re talking about a cost of well over $100,000 to discover it, not including the cost of publishing it. With a bottom line like that, it had better be one helluva book! But because most publishers don’t believe they will find such a consummate masterpiece under those bushels of over-the-transom submissions, they consider it more cost-effective to leave the sorting-out to the agents and spend the $100,000 where it can do more good– or at least where they think it can do more good. For this reason, it can be stated with some accuracy that an editor will read the most dismal piece of junk submitted by a literary agent faster and maybe even more attentively than he will a good book that comes in on the slush pile.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Copyright (c) 1983. 1984, 1996, 2003 by Richard Curtis. All rights reserved

Sometime in the first half of this year Google will open the doors to its bookstore, called Google Editions. Ian Paul, in PC World, writes: “Unlike Google’s biggest competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google’s store will not be device-specific – allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on the far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010″

That spells good news for the makers of all those new e-reading gadgets that may be well engineered and loaded with fun features but are hard-up for content. Amazon has its Kindle, but because its system is closed (that’s what DRM means) you can’t easily get Kindle content on a non-Kindle device. Same goes for B&N and its Nook.

Now you’ll be able to download Google’s vast (half a million at launch) library on just about any device available. Since most publishers have not given their content exclusively to Amazon or B&N, you’ll be able to find and buy it from Google editions and read it on your Que, Skiff, Cool-Er, Flepia, or any other device. Just try not to be embarrassed when someone asks you the name of that e-book reader you’re holding in your hand.

The deal Google offers publishers is 63 % of gross sales. This compares favorable with the 50% offered by most e-retailers. But Google is also offering to partner with retailers. If you decide you’d like to open an e-book retail store but don’t know how and where to acquire the content, Google will furnish it. Your company would get 55 percent of revenues less a commission for Google.

“Google’s e-books would reportedly be indexed and searchable like many books are now through Google’s Book Search,” says Paul. “Unlike titles offered through e-readers, Google Editions books would not have to be accessed through a dedicated reader or special application.Instead, any device with a Web browser will be able to access a Google Editions book. After you purchase and access your online book for the first time, it will be cached in your browser making the book available when you’re offline.”

Details in Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format

Richard Curtis

Are you still flipping channels with a clicker? Running a game with a joystick? That is so 2009! This is the year you’ll be making like Tom Cruise in Minority Report and manipulating your screen with a wave of a hand – or a foot.

“Stand in front of a TV armed with a gesture technology camera,” writes Ashlee Vance in the New York Times, “and you can turn on the set with a soft punch into the air. Flipping through channels requires a twist of the hand, and raising the volume occurs with an upward pat. If there is a photo on the screen, you can enlarge it by holding your hands in the air and spreading them apart and shrink it by bringing your hands back together as you would do with your fingers on a cellphone touch screen.”

Read about every couch jockey’s dream in Giving Electronic Commands With Body Language, and check out the performance in the demo below.

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.

Scorecard here! Can’t tell yer e-book readers without a scorecard!

That seems to be the consensus of bloggers covering the recent Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas. Inspired by the success of the Kindle, Sony eReader, and Nook, a host of would-be Kindle-killers and Nookslayers has flooded the marketplace with lookalikes, playalikes and costalikes. Consumers who’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for a second generation of e-readers are now shaking their heads in confusion. Huffington Post has produced a handy-dandy guide for the perplexed with photos and thumbnail descriptions of each device. Just click here, then go the red navigation bar and click “Next” to view a complete array of current e-book reader choices. It may answer your questions. Or it may leave you as mixed up as ever.

So…with so many gadgets to choose among and factors to compare, is there a simple single decisive criterion to guide us home? In fact there is: Content. All things being more or less equal, you can’t go too wrong selecting a reader with a rich library or store of books, magazines, newspapers and other publications.

A case in point is a device displayed at the Consumer Electronic Show called the Skiff Reader. Dan Nosowitz, Gizmodo’s reviewer, gave it high marks for beauty, slimness, weight, screen size and functionality: “I just got a chance to play with the big-screened, touchscreened Skiff Reader, which is targeted at periodicals. It’s incredibly thin, incredibly light, and they’ve even got a color screen prototype—Kindle and Nook should be scared.”

They should be scared but they won’t be for one simple reason: Skiff does not have a store or library of content behind it. “Kindle and Nook waltzed into this world with massive and well-known stores behind them,” says Gizmodo, “and the Skiff is creating one from scratch. They’ve got a lot of publishers behind them, but the store right now is pretty bare. Of course, since it’s not out yet, this may all be a moot point—but I wonder if their scrappy little store can compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble.”

Wilson Rothman, blogging for Gawker, states the case for content even more bluntly in a posting titled There Are Officially Too Many E-Book Readers. A lot of consumers, he writes, “will buy some $100 reader, then wonder why they can’t borrow books from their friend who has a Nook, or can’t get the same stuff that’s sold on the Kindle.”

Rothman also raises a very important point: if the new breed of cheap e-book readers doesn’t carry legitimate content, customers might turn to file-sharing pirates for it. “Cheap e-ink readers will essentially be targeted at people with libraries of pirated books,” he says.

What’s a consumer to do? Rothman seems to be urging us to wait a little longer until full color, multitouch tablets reach the marketplace. “E-ink is an interim technology, a stopgap measure to keep our attention till we have full-color video tablets (slates?) whose batteries last for ‘days’.”

Rothman’s bottom line? “Go Kindle, wait for a cheap-as-hell reader, pray for a slate, or buy a book. A real paper-and-ink book.”

Richard Curtis

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” We’ve heard that phrase often lately in connection with fast-and-loose high-rollers whose overinflated positions have been exposed by the recession. Our candidate for Naked Swimmer of the Year is Barry O’Callaghan , CEO of the parent company of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that is instituting a “restructuring” that may wipe out a lot of investors and the bank that backed them.

Michael Cader has written a poker-faced review of O’Callaghan’s breathtaking excuses and finger-pointing, blaming everyone and everything but Canada. He does however blame California!

Read Cader’s step by step summary of how O’Callaghan brought his company to the verge of ruin: More From Barry “Don’t Blame Me” O’Callaghan.

RC

Last March Houghton Mifflin’s parent company, staggering under a $7 billion debt load resulting from an ill-timed leveraged acquisition, put the trade book publisher up for sale (see Psst…Wanna Buy a Publisher Cheap?), but subsequently decided to see if it could restructure its finances. It seemed like a good idea in view of an annual debt service of $500 million.

Now, Michael Cader reports in Publishers Lunch that EMPG, Houghton’s owner, is going to try another restructuring “that would wipe out equity-holders entirely and turn the company over to its secured lenders.” Where we come from that’s what we call bankruptcy.

And yet, Cader notes, this calamity “could in a perverse way be the best thing for the company, which appears stable as an ongoing operation absent the unrealistic level of debt taken on to build the conglomerate in the first place.” The Italics are mine: to put it another way, EMPG and Houghton are sound operations except for a gambling debt so colossal that it will wipe out those foolish enough to have bought into it and threaten to ruin the bank that funded this misadventure. “These developments have no adverse effect on our day-to-day operations, on our employees, or on the nature and quality of the service we provide to our customers and business partners,” an EMPG statement says. I thought that one was worth italicizing too. It might have been spoken by the wine steward on the Titanic.

A Viennese general whose troops were surrounded is said to have reported to his commanding officer that his situation was “desperate but not serious.” Thus does Houghton bravely carry on even as its owner lets loose the wrecking ball.

Richard Curtis

One of the hit tech wonders of the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a schizophrenic screen called the Pixel Qi that may solve some major problems for e-book manufacturers. Foremost among those problems is how to extend battery life in the forthcoming power-gobbling generation of tablets.

The principle is simple enough. “The gray-and-white E Ink displays on devices like the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook do not have color and cannot show video,” writes the New York Times‘s Brad Stone. “Computers can, but text is difficult to read in full sunlight on laptop displays, which also hog battery power and can strain the eyes when reading for long periods.”

Like a hybrid car that alternates between gas and battery power, the Pixel Qi maximizes energy efficiency. Earlier this week we wondered whether the soon-to-be-announced Apple iSlate might be a battery-drainer. Could Pixel Qi be the remedy?

Read One Screen to Read It All and judge. But if the iSlate doesn’t use Pixel Qi, don’t be surprise if others do. A half-dozen manufacturers “were showing devices with Pixel Qi’s screen behind the scenes at the show and preparing to sell them later this year,” says Stone.

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.

SciTeDaily.com tells us that a team of University of Tokyo researchers claims to have simulated the process that Google recently patented to produce error-free images during high-speed scans of books.

The process corrects distortions created by the bending of pages near the binding, and does it while those pages are being rapidly turned. “The computer knows what the pattern looks like when it is flat,” SciTeDaily explains, “so when the computer sees the amount of distortion the pattern undergoes upon falling on the page, it can deduce the curvature.”

You can read about it here, and for the technical-minded there are cool illustrations and a video. You might also like to see a truly high-speed scanner: check out this one, also developed by Tokyo scientists, that flips pages faster than a card deck shuffled by a Vegas croupier.

For a thrilling climax to your tour of scanners you can see the world’s sexiest one in the video below but be warned that it is X-rated and you may need to take a cold shower after watching it in action.

Generally speaking there are two fundamental scanning processes. One simply photographs pages to produce a read-only PDF file. The other produces a computer-readable file – an RTF – that is the basis for conversion of printed books into digital files for Kindles, Nooks, Sony eReaders, and other devices.

The latter is a far more complex, demanding and expensive process. Ideally the scanner should produce a perfect text file but that is seldom the case. Not only are there distortions like those described above but frequently, if the pages are yellow or wrinkled or dusty the camera does not pick the words up cleanly. For example, “nn” can come out looking like “m”, or “l” might show up as “1″. Though scanning technology has come a long way, you need to understand that even 99.9% perfection in the “OCR” (Optical Character Recognition) still means one typo in every three or four pages. Therefore proofreaders are almost always required. Once the RTF is completely error-free, it is ready to be formatted for your e-book.

Richard Curtis