Another study confirms our suspicions that reading books on computer or e-book screens compromises learning and retention. Experiments with children and college students have pointed to the conclusion that screen media are more distracting than their paper counterparts.

Now a study conducted by product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group has quantified these conjectures. Participants were asked to read some stories by Ernest Hemingway in printed form and on a variety of e-reading devices: an iPad, a Kindle and a desktop PC.

The results, as reported by Lauren Indvik of Mashable, were eye-opening: reading speeds were 6.2% slower on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle. “Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast,” Indvik writes.  Comprehension suffered, too, especially on the PC, where readers complained that it “reminded readers of work.”

The sampling was modest – 24 participants  (Indvik says that “10 is about average for a usability survey”) – and is far from conclusive. But the indications are ominous. “I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed,” says Indvik. This comes just as schools and governments consider switching from paper to e-textbooks. See Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.

For further reading see Watching Books, The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction, More Evidence that Screens=Distraction, and Students Give E-Textbooks Failing Grade).

Richard Curtis

E-book sales statistics for May 2010 have been released by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in conjunction with the International Digital Publishing Forum and there’s been yet another might leap: trade eBook sales were $29,300,000 for May, a 260% increase over May 2009 ($11,200,000).

We’ve become so spoiled by triple and quadruple sales growth that when the jump is “only” 260% we begin to fret that sales are starting to flatten.  But our statisticians remind us that the real numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts. Even if they aren’t, every business should all be so lucky to experience “flat” business growth of 260%!

As always, we’re reminded by AAP and IDPF that…

• The data above represent United States revenues only
• The data above represent only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels.
  
• The data above represent only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
• The 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

Richard Curtis

Damn! The Cool-er may die before we  learn how to pronounce its name. Martin Daniels on the Bookseller Association blog says the “Cooler reader looks to be another casualty of the squeeze that is inevitable in the ‘lookie likie’ E Ink reader market. They follow iRex in what may be a growing queue of dead technology failures.” Don’t forget Skiff, which dropped out of the e-device market a few weeks ago.

What’s going on?  The front-running e-readers – Kindle, Nook and Sony – all sit on large bodies of content, whereas many of the upstart gadgets have been counting on succeeding strictly on the merits of such competitive qualities as thinner, cheaper, lighter, brighter, more colorful etc. But they also have to beg, borrow or scrounge content. The only outsider holding its own is Apple’s iPad, and one good reason why is that it aggregated a lot of content soon after launching.

So – what went wrong with the Cool-er? Daniels says that it “entered the market in full color with a spectrum of cases, but forgot to make the screen color too. They also misjudged their launch with a stand and presentation more geared to a car show than a book show and their one trick pony was just a color case.”

And of course there was the dumb name. Daniels calls it the “Cooler” but it was introduced as the “Cool-er”.  “Aren’t consumers going to be confused by a b&w reader that sounds like “Col-or”?” we asked (See Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name)  “Or is it supposed to suggest the device is cool. Do you pronounce the word like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices? Or do you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er. No matter how you say it, it’s awkward, cacophonous and meaningless.”

Now it looks like we may never know. Same goes for the Plastic Logic device which, after tormenting us endlessly by withholding the name, finally announced the “Que”.  Is that pronounced “Cue?” “Kwee”? Or is it “Que” as in “Que pasa?”  However you say it, the Que’s release is seriously delayed and it too could be an also-ran in the e-reader sweepstakes. In fact Daniels says “We doubt we will see E Ink readers as we know them today in 2012…The only stay of execution will be a drop to $99 a unit.”

Richard Curtis

Cover design by Nathan Fernald

As books pass from the Tangible to the Digital Age the value of cover design is being called into question.  At least by Ben East, blogging on TheNational.ae in an article called Cover story.

Riffing on the cliche “You can’t tell a book by its cover,” East wonders whether cover design means anything any more. His conclusion? “The future of good book design looks decidedly bleak.”

East likens the state of book jackets to record albums. “Not long ago, a good looking album cover was a vital part of the image of a band and its fans; unsubtly leaving beautiful, sought-after records around your living room was like a window into your cooler-than-thou world. Now, such designs are hidden away in hard drives.”

Cover design by Nathan Fernald

If you no longer display your books in your library or living room, or even on a bus or park bench (see Can You Tell a Book Reader From its Cover?), is there any point for publishers to labor over designing striking covers? It’s tempting to say no, especially because all e-book covers show in black, white and grayscale on the E Ink screens of Kindle, Sony, Nook and their lesser kin.

But remember that that was the first generation of e-book reading devices. The next one, led by Apple’s iPad, sports full color screens.  Your e-book’s text will still be black and white but the cover will be fully saturated color, and it will definitely make a difference when you’re deciding whether to buy that e-book. Obviously e-book covers won’t employ foil and embossing but any publisher that believe consumers don’t choose e-books by what’s displayed on the screen is probably losing business.

Cover design by Andy Ross

E-Reads’ designers put a lot of creative thought into producing selling covers.  Embedded in this posting are a few recent ones. We’re revisiting our early covers and plan to replace them in due time.

So – who cares if you can’t tell a book by its cover?

We do.

By the way, did you figure out where .ae is?  Uh-uh – no fair googling!*

Richard Curtis

* .ae is The Arab Emirates

Whatever the common impression may be, literary agents take no pleasure whatever in rejecting books. Nor does our skin get thicker the longer we do it. Nathan Bransford, an agent, author and blogger expresses his distaste articulately:

“Every day I have to pass on the life’s work of cancer survivors and abuse victims and war heroes and many more people who spent hours upon hours of their life writing a novel in the faint hope that it would someday find publication. I don’t enjoy sending these rejection letters, and I never forget that on the other end of the letter there’s a person out there whose day I’m probably ruining and whose dreams I’m chipping away at.”

Until the digital era most of those rejected authors would have put their books in a drawer.  Or perhaps a few who could afford it arranged for a vanity press to publish them for many thousands of dollars. That all changed with the advent of digital technology. Today those rejectees are able to produce handsome e-book and print on demand editions for next to nothing. And agent Bransford says that should be music to the ears of every agent. Why?

For one thing, it eases our conscience, shifting the crushing burden of judgment from the shoulders of the few – agents, editor, critics and other so-called gatekeepers – to the larger public. But it’s even bigger than that, for this new way of evaluating literary quality symptomizes the emerging paradigm of proleterianism replacing the elitist value system that has dominated literature for centuries.  Bransford describes the process as “The Print Funnel.”

“What’s changing” he writes, “is that the funnel is in the process of inverting – from a top down publishing process to one that’s bottom up. Yes, many (if not most) of the books that will see publication in the new era will only be read by a handful of people. Rather than a rejection letter from an agent, authors will be met with the silence of a trickle of sales. And that’s okay!! Even if a book is only purchased by a few friends and family members — what’s the harm?”

Okay, maybe no harm.  But what about good? Do we care what the masses think are good books? Will their opinion influence us?

Before you answer, take your trusty Zagat restaurant guide down from the shelf.  On whose recommendation do you decide where you’re going to dine? The fact is, Zagat‘s restaurant reviewers are your anonymous next-door neighbors. They are anybodies; they are nobodies.  But when they give a restaurant’s food, service and ambiance a high rating, you say “Let’s go!

Still looking down your nose at the masses? Perhaps a visit to Amazon.com will change your mind. Amazon boasts a cadre of reviewers who regularly cover specific genres. If you read enough coverage by the same reviewer you may conclude that this person’s judgment is reliable and enlightening and may actually motivate you to buy a book. (See Do Amazon Reviews Count?)

Amazon.com reviews are Bransford’s inverted funnel at work. We think he’s onto something.  Read The Rejection Letter of the Future Will Be Silence (And Why This is a Good Thing) and judge for yourself.

Richard Curtis

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild and is one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003). In 1995, Yarbro was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism and the Romanian Ministry of Culture.

Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire, the Count Saint-Germain. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction and filtered it through a feminist perspective that both the giving of sustenance and its taking were of equal erotic potency. E-Reads is happy to begin bringing many of Yarbro’s St. Germain novels back into print.

In the first published volume, Hotel Transylvania (forthcoming soon), we meet Saint-Germain in Paris during the reign of Louis XV when he is, apparently, a wealthy, worldly, charismatic aristocrat, envied and desired by many but fully known to none. In fact, he is a vampire, born in the Carpathian Mountains in 2119 BC, turned in his late-thirties in 2080 BC and destined to roam the world forever, watching and participating in history and, through the author, giving us an amazing perspective on the time-tapestry of human civilization.

In The Palace, Renaissance Florence provides the background for this story of the collapse of the artistic and literary life of the city after the death of Saint-Germain’s friend Lorenzo the Magnificent, followed by the rise of the fanatical Savonarola.

Subtitled “A Mobile Utopia”, this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history presents spacefaring as no book has ever done. George Zebrowski’s Macrolife is a utopia like no other, presenting a dynamic civilization that transcends the failures of our history.

Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth’s richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife–mobile, self-reproducing space habitats.

A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place.

One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole.

Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.

Easton Press published Macrolife in its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series.

In the sequel to Macrolife, Cave of Stars , Old Earth is gone. Humanity has been scattered to the stars. Some left their dying planet in spaceship arks, in search of new worlds to inhabit. Others, nanoengineered for near-immortality, explore the far reaches of interstellar space in gargantuan macrolife mobiles.

An earthlike human society endures on the environmentally volatile planet of Tau Ceti IV–a rigid community of the faithful that has declared evil the science that caused the homeworld’s destruction. The Church is the absolute power here; obedience and belief the rule. But His Holiness Peter III, the New Vatican’s most powerful figure, himself harbors doubts, engendered by his love for his unacknowledged and illegitimate rebel daughter Josepha. And suddenly there is another assault on his tottering faith–and on the sacred tradtitions he has devoted his life to uphold. For an emissary, Voss Rhazes, has arrived from one of old Earth’s journeying mobiles–the first off-planet human visitor ever to Tau Ceti–bearing remarkable hated technology that could shred the fragile emotional fabric of a family…and bring devastating chaos to their world.

Zebrowski’s works have been translated into eight languages; his short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Brute Orbits, an uncompromising novel about a future penal system, was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year in 1999.

An agent friend of mine wrote to me as follows:

“Her eyes were crystal blue and she looked at me across the table with withering candor.  ‘I just don’t think she would climax that fast,’  she said.  ‘She’s the kind of woman who needs to take it up slowly.’ Her gaze never unlocked from mine as she spoke to me.

“Had I been the brooding hero of a novel I’d have responded with a seductive rejoinder.  But I’m not the hero of a novel.  I’m a literary agent. The stunning woman opposite me was an editor, and we were discussing a sex scene in a romance novel by an author I represented. Whatever repartee I might have thought of, there was only one appropriate – if wimpy – response:  ‘I’ll discuss it with my client.’”

Exchanges like that one take place every day in the book industry, and Russell Smith, writing in the Globe and Mail about a prominent publishing executive recently caught up in a sexual harassment scandal, reminds us that the publishing business is saturated in sexuality.

“It’s an unusual industry,” Smith writes, “one dominated by highly educated and intelligent women, many of them young. Most of the high-up executives on the commercial side of publishing are still men. The literary side is female. Most of the editors-in-chief of the major publishing houses are women; most of the publicists are women; almost all the agents are women; the powerful CBC Radio programs that discuss books are hosted by women; most of the readers are women; the single powerful bookstore chain in the country is run by a woman. And it is a highly social industry, because social events promote books: Anyone who works for a publishing house must attend, as part of work, frequent evening book launches, book fairs and literary festivals, and they are all soaked in booze. So are most of the writers.

“Furthermore, if you’re involved with fiction, or even with memoir and biography, you’re discussing sex and romance the whole time – because most novels still have relationships at their core. So you spend a lot of genuine professional work time, as a straight male talking to straight females, answering questions like, ‘Why would she let him take her top off right then?’ It becomes difficult to define exactly what flirting is in this environment.”

So – why aren’t there more sex scandals in publishing?  A key reason is professionalism.  Fatal Attraction notwithstanding, lust and lechery do not mix with representing or publishing authors.  “I need these people working at their best and most relaxed,” says Smith. “They make me look good. If I made any of my colleagues nervous about talking to me or seeing me then I would only be damaging myself. They wouldn’t want to help me. So you could say it’s a selfish self-control. Hell, even a consensual relationship would be idiotic: I need my colleagues to be objective and unemotional. And I need my career more than I need the ego-boost of impressing a lady. Perhaps I’m getting old, but believe it or not, I actually value my colleagues’ professional abilities more than their beauty.”

Publishing people are commendably restrained when it comes to surrendering to sexual temptation with their professional colleagues.  Most of us are content to enjoy hot sex vicariously through the vehicle of a well crafted (what I call a Three Cold Shower) fictional sex scene.  And some people I know have confided that seeing a book they’re involved in hit the bestseller list is better than sex.

Call it weird. Call it perverse.  Call it publishing.

Read The truth about publishing: It’s full of hotties

Richard Curtis

Okay, e-reader mavens, it’s time to play Name That Device. Here’s a description of a popular one:

A handheld electronic device comprising: a housing; an electronic paper display disposed in the housing and having a first surface area; and a liquid crystal display (LCD) disposed in the housing proximate the electronic paper display, the LCD having a second surface area that is smaller than the first surface area of the electronic paper display.

Sounds like Barnes & Noble’s Nook, right?

Wrong. It’s a description of a patent applied for by Amazon in 2006, a patent that Amazon never published – until now. And the United States Patent and Trademark Office has just granted the patent to Amazon!

Nilay Patel writing in Engadget calls the revelation “Juicy.”  It could be a lot more than that if Amazon decides to file an infringement claim against B&N.

Patel reminds us that “Barnes & Noble is already involved in a trade secret dispute over the Nook with Spring Design, which claims that B&N saw its Alex reader under NDA [Non-Disclosure Agreement] and then copied it for the Nook.” That case is still pending. (See Who is Alex and Why Is He Suing the Nook People?)

B&N’s patent attorneys are going to have their hands full in the coming months.

Richard Curtis

A fierce debate about the role of literary agents has burst into flames. Agent Victoria Strauss has summed it up in a posting in Writer Beware entitled Are agents underpaid?

Those who are sympathetic towards the agents’ plight point out that “agents’ job descriptions have expanded over the past couple of decades, and that they must now do much more for the same 15% they earned twenty years ago.” writes Strauss. “They also get no payment at all for a good portion of what they do on a regular basis–reading queries and manuscripts, editing, submitting books that never sell. In a highly competitive environment, with shrinking advances (at the midlist level, anyway) and cautious publishers, it’s getting harder and harder to make a living.” (That’s putting it mildly.  See What Your Agent Has Done for You Lately.”)

A variety of remedies for suffering agents is being promulgated. One is to shift their compensation from a contingency basis to charging for billable hours the way lawyers do.  Another is charging for specific services that are now freely offered, such as editing, lecture and tour arrangements, marketing, promotional activities, website management, and social networking. Still others are setting up publication programs for clients who contemplate self-publication. Another answer is for agents to raise their commissions. About this option Strauss reminds us that “During the 1980s and 1990s, US agents raised their commissions from 10% to 15%; it seems to me that an increase to 20% could be undertaken with relatively minimal pain on all sides. This would acknowledge the ways in which agenting has changed and expanded, but wouldn’t unfairly burden writers.” (Strauss does not seem to have confirmed that with any authors.)

These are all viable alternatives, and some of them are being implemented as agents urgently strive to redefine themselves. Many of them will work. But will agents still be defined as agents as we know them today? Or are we witnessing the birth of a new species?

Years ago, in anticipation of the changing identity of authors in a digital paradigm, I asked the question “Author?  What’s an Author?” Implied in that question was another question: “Agent? What’s an Agent?” As the nature of authorship evolves, so will the nature of agentship. But a day will come when agents are unrecognizably transformed from the fearsome breed that tramped the Earth in the late 20th century. Which leads me to wonder if we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “Are agents underpaid?” but rather, Are agents doomed?

The inescapable fact is that agents are intermediaries in a disintermediating world, and digital technology is remorseless in its dissolution of those who stand between buyer and seller. The chasm between writers and publishers, for so long occupied by literary agents, has narrowed as authors realize that they are but one touch of their Send key away from their readers.

That depressing but inescapable truth should be borne in mind as you read Strauss’s Are Agents Underpaid? and the equally thought-provoking response by Jane Friedman, Director of Content & Community Development at Writer’s Digest, entitled Agents Need to Develop Alternative Models.

Richard Curtis