Since the Kindle was introduced in 2007 we’ve seen scores of rival gadgets, all touted as a Kindle Killer. The Nook can do this and the iPad can do that and the Sony can do the other thing. And it’s true, they’re all wonderful in their own way. But I want to talk about a reading device that I’m crazy about that I think has been neglected in this tidal wave of hype.

Behold, emerging from 500 years of beta testing, the real Kindle Killer. Like so many other reading devices it’s got a cutesy name. It’s called The Book.

Let’s review some of its features.

* It’s really sleek. At five inches by eight inches, the Greeks would have appreciated the perfection of its dimensions.
* It’s light. It weighs 15 ounces, placing it between the flimsy-feeling Kindle and the weighty iPad.
* It’s flexible: you can roll it up without damaging it.
* Its operating system is 50-pound paper stock bound on the left-hand seam.
* It has no battery that we’re aware of, nor are we able to locate anything resembling a wireless antenna.
* Its graphic interface is ivory-white and its surface packs so many dots per inch that we are able to read eight- or even six-point text clearly in ambient light.
* There is no pixilation whatever.
* How about surface reflectivity? Unlike the Apple iPad, whose mirrorlike surface will blind you at the beach, the surface reflectivity of The Book is negligible.
* It’s almost impossible to smudge. You can press your thumb onto the surface but you won’t see a hint of fingerprint.
* You can drop the book on a concrete floor but when you pick it up it will still operate perfectly.
* Bookmarking is a cinch. You just insert a small card to mark your place, and when you’re ready to resume reading you pick up where you left off without a moment’s delay.
* Pagination? Instead of a progress bar, this gadget reckons your progress in consecutive numbers. Just like the Kindle.
* The Book smells great.
* It sound great, too. When you activate the page-turning feature (the technical term is “flipping the pages”) you will hear a satisfying pffftt. Just like the iPad.

There are admittedly a few design flaws. The Book is not backlit and requires supplemental lighting in a dim room. such as a light bulb. Another small problem is that it must be operated with two hands, one to support it and one to activate the page-turning mechanism. And dictionary and thesaurus lookup are a little clunky, requiring offsite reference texts.

But these are petty annoyances, especially when you hear the price. Fully loaded, how much would you expect to pay for this baby? Three hundred bucks? Five hundred? Would you believe $14.95?

******************

I may be a pioneer in the e-book business, but as far as I’m concerned the printed book remains the perfect reading device, and anyone who thinks it’s nothing but a fifteenth century artifact is in for a big surprise.

Right now we are totally infatuated with reading on screens, and there’s a lot to be infatuated about. Everyone I know who has a Kindle adores it. And the Apple iPad is a miracle of modern technology. But a time is coming when we’ll rub the fairy dust out of our eyes and discover serious shortcomings in the use of screens for the purpose of reading. And some of those shortcomings are pretty serious. When we realize that they are, we will take a new, good long look at printed books and we will realize that there is simply nothing comparable.

I can hear you saying, “Yeah, but by the time we do realize it, the book industry will be over.” Well, the book industry that I grew up with and that many of you grew up with – that industry may well be over. In my own lifetime I have seen the number of viable trade book publishing companies shrink from around one thousand to around one dozen.

The remaining houses have been granted a stay of execution by digital technology, but even they will be unrecognizable a decade from now, because the paradigm shift will have completely altered the way printed books are published and distributed. So let’s remind ourselves about how they are published and distributed.

As I just demonstrated, there is nothing wrong with books themselves. No creation of science and technology can match it for sensory pleasure. It completely satisfies four out of five of your basic senses – visual, audial, tactile, and olfactory. I’ve never eaten a book, so I don’t know how they taste.

It’s not just the books but the culture of books that I am so enamored of. From the collegial relationships of book-loving men and women to the wheeling and dealing to that unique blend of commerce and culture known as the publishing lunch – the environment of the old publishing world cannot be duplicated by that solitary enterprise known as self-publishing. The narcotic excitement of discovering a new voice, of sharing it with others, of deal making – converting literary value into dollar value, seeing those great reviews and watching your discovery climb on the bestseller list, the adventure, the surprises, the fun, the love – many of my colleagues have described it as better than sex.

But I’m not going to overly romanticize that world, because beneath the surface of all that glamor and money, a disease has been eating the book business.

I said there’s nothing wrong with books. That’s true. But everything is wrong with the way they’re distributed. About eighty years ago publishers and booksellers made a Devil’s pact making unsold stock returnable for full credit. That worked for a few decades, but after World War II the rate of returns began to soar. Today it’s not uncommon for 50% of any given printing to be returned to the publisher, and the industry never solved the problem of what to with returns. Now, you tell any business person that you’re in an industry where for every two units of a product you manufacture you have to eat one of them and they’ll look at you like you’re insane. And the fact is, the publishing industry as we have known it is collectively…insane!

Preprinting hundreds of thousands of copies of a book on spec, knowing that you’re going to sell half of them – and you don’t even know which half – could anything be madder? Shipping them on trucks around the country, storing them in warehouses the size of supertankers, returning them on more trucks, remaindering them at a fraction of your manufacturing cost or dumping them into a paper pulper – surely if an alien from another planet looked at our publishing industry he’d return to home base and report there is no intelligent life on that planet (as happened in a story I wrote called Pulpscape)

The returnability of books has poisoned the publishing industry, causing untold numbers of publishers big and small to merge with or be acquired by more powerful houses, leaving us with that handful of behemoths I told you about. And yet those behemoths are still hemorrhaging cash because the return rates continue to run as high as 50%. What’s worse, the returnability problem has seriously damaged literary endeavor. The big publishers want books that will guarantee low returns, and that means celebrity autobiographies, the sexier the better. So, if you want to know why you can’t sell your Great American novel, it’s because your publisher has just paid $12 million for a collection of spaghetti recipes by some notorious serial murderer. The return rate on that book will be 10%, while the one on your Great American Novel will be 75%.

I’ve been haranguing publishers about this for thirty years and it’s clear they can’t change this crazy business model, or they don’t want to. And besides, it’s too late now, because there’s a new and better one. It’s called print on demand, and most of you understand the concept. Instead of printing books first and hoping to find customers, with print on demand the books aren’t printed until the customer has paid for it. The return rate on that business model? How about zero percent? Go ask that businessperson friend of yours which model he prefers, the one with 50% returns or the one with zero. He’ll give you a one word answer: “Duh!”

Why am I telling you this? Because the print on demand industry is growing at a gallop.

David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world, reported last spring that business was growing at a rate of 20% to 30% each year. Lightning prints, binds and ships 10,000 copies a day on machines that run around the clock. And that’s just one POD company. There’s another big one. It’s owned by a little outfit called Amazon. And while POD is soaring, bookstores sales are soft and getting softer. Borders is bankrupt and Barnes & Noble revenues are down. In the next couple of years you’re not only going to see bookstores close, you’re probably going to see whole chains close.

So, that’s one reason why I’m not writing off printed books. They’re just fine, thank you. But more and more they’re going to be coming to you from a print on demand facility and less and less from a bookstore. Oh, you’ll still be able to buy a book in a store, but it won’t necessarily be a bookstore. As we refine print on demand technology the POD presses like the Espresso will become more and more compact, and in time you’ll start seeing them in drugstores and supermarkets, Wal-Marts and Costcos and Starbucks. You’ll go up to a kiosk, select from a million books, swipe your card, have a cup of coffee and go back to collect your book, still wet and warm from passing through the birth canal. In fact, given how rapidly technology is able to miniaturize machinery, I wouldn’t be surprised if a day came when a print on demand press is reduced to the size of fax or photocopier.

There’s another reason you should continue to be high on print. A growing body of research indicates that people, particularly students, either don’t like to learn on e-book devices, or suffer focus, learning and retention problems. This is particularly true in the field of text books, where students have serious issues navigating reference e-books as easily as they do printed ones.

So, what’s the problem with screens? Anyone who’s spent more than ten minutes reading on one knows how easily distracted we are. Screens mean watching. We’ve grown up watching stuff on screens, websites and videos and movies. Now you look at text on that screen, just plain old black on a white background, and you say to yourself, Is that all there is? No color? No interactivity? No instant gratification? Maybe I’ll just check out YouTube to see if there are some kittens walking on a piano or corgis running on a treadmill. Now, if you feel that way, you shouldn’t be surprised that your kids do, too, and their falling grades reflect that doing schoolwork on an electronic reading device isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Whether you’re an adult or a child, you want to immerse yourself in a book. It’s hard to immerse yourself in an e-book. It’s the difference between reading a book and watching one. Have you watched a good book lately? Not the same thing!

There’s no question that the e-book revolution has arrived and arrived with a vengeance. Thanks to the convenience and low prices, the print book industry has taken a big hit. But it’s still a 24 billion dollar business, and e-book sales represent only nine percent of the total. There’s plenty of fuel left in print, and once the new model of business takes hold, one based on preorder and prepayment, a day will come when you’re as likely to see someone on a bus or train reading one of these devices called The Book as you are to see them reading a Nook or Kindle.

Richard Curtis is President of Richard Curtis Associates, a literary agency, and CEO of E-Reads, an e-book publisher. He blogs on www.ereads.com.

If u cn rd ths u r nt ded.

Doomsday, scheduled to take place yesterday, failed to materialize. That means Book Expo America is on.

Fundamentalists, whose loins had been girt and garments rent for months, were deeply disappointed and not a little upset with prophets who obviously committed a rounding error in their prognostication of End of Days. But exhibitors and attendees of Book Expo America, which opens its doors to the public on Tuesday, are rejoicing despite the fact that prophecies of the future of publishing are even more dire than those of the end of the world. (See Prediction of Doomsday Spook BEA Attendees).

Those of you who held back, reluctant to spend money on a convention that might vaporize before it opens, can now safely make plans to attend BEA with relative security. We say “relative” because it is possible that the auguries set for May 21 were a few days off as a result of failure by Biblical scholars to account for one Leap Year in 1996.

That glitch notwithstanding, we’ll see you at BEA.

Richard Curtis

E-Reads goes mobile!

From now on it will be easier to access E-Reads on your mobile phone. We’ve developed an easy-to-use way to access our blog posts on any Android, iPhone, blackberry, and other browser supporting smart phones.

Just go to ereads.com on your mobile device.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt dealt authors and publishers a staggering and possibly fatal blow by declaring he opposed any effort to curtail Google’s right to link to piracy websites like Pirate Bay.  And he said it in such unequivocal terms that any author cherishing a shred of hope for the protection of his or her rights is spitting in the wind.

Josh Halliday of The Guardian reports: “Speaking to journalists after his keynote speech at Google’s Big Tent conference in London, Schmidt said the online search giant would challenge attempts to restrict access to the Pirate Bay and other so-called “cyberlocker” sites that encourage illegal downloading – part of government plans to fight online piracy through controversial measures included in the Digital Economy Act.”

We don’t know how his speech went down, as England’s Digital Economy Act is one of the few government initiatives anywhere in the world that attempts to punish illegal filesharers.  (See Brits Hit Pirates While Yanks Fiddle)

Comparing efforts to control Google links to pirate sites with repressive Chinese mind-control, Schmidt said in no uncertain terms: “If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites] to do X and it’s passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it,” he added. “If it’s a request the answer is we wouldn’t do it, if it’s a discussion we wouldn’t do it.”

Read Google boss: anti-piracy laws would be disaster for free speech and despair.  But save your spit.  This game is over.

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of posts about piracy visit E-Reads’ Pirate Central

The investment world is abuzz with the news that John Malone’s Liberty Media, a conglomerate that owns Starz and QVC among other holdings, has made an offer to acquire Barnes & Noble.  B&N’s value ebbed as rival amazon.com soared to dominance through brilliant technology and marketing.  The launch of the Kindle and its preeminence in the e-book space set a torrid pace that the traditional book chain could not keep up with.

But B&N’s stock value has been climbing back spearheaded by its own digital strategy built around its Nook E-Reader.  It may be the entertainment potential of the Nook that attracted John Malone.

RC

Assuming that Book Expo America is not called on account of Apocalypse, the annual bookfest will launch next week.  The first day, sponsored by the International Digital Publishing Forum, is devoted to all things digital, and though the rest of the week will ostensibly be dedicated to book-books, the specter of e-books will haunt every exhibit and transaction.

You would think that the only respite from the inexorable march of digitization is for book lovers to seek refuge in the great bookstores of a bygone day. But in fact many beautiful book stores still exist if you know where to look for them.  And Megan Cytron writing on Salon has listed fourteen of them accompanied by mouth-watering photographs.

Here’s their paean:

What makes a bookstore beautiful? As their numbers dwindle in so many places, just having the doors open may qualify. Many of the shops in this slide show took over repurposed buildings whose previous tenants were once important local institutions like glove factories, theaters, friaries and grist mills. All of them are brimming over with beauty of one kind or another — opulent architecture, quirky one-of-a-kind collections, unique ways of encouraging exploration, teetering stacks of mystery and chaos that reflect a community’s reading habits. It’s terrifying to consider that the generations alive today may be the last to experience the serendipity of scouring shelves of books side by side with other bibliophiles.

For passionate bibliophiles these shops are not merely places to go before you die. They are places you go to die, happily suffocated by beloved books and buried beneath the stacks.

For a slide show see The World’s Most Inspiring Bookstores

Richard Curtis

Thanks to Facebook human communications are in danger of deteriorating into grunts. Lengthy and eloquent descriptions of our emotional states have been reduced to “Like” and “Dislike”.

Nowhere is this lapse into monosyllables more distressing than romance. Had Facebook existed in Edmund Rostand’s day, wouldn’t this outpouring of Cyrano de Bergerac to his beloved Roxanne – “And what is a kiss, specifically? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of a lip, a rosy circle drawn around the verb ‘to love’ – been reduced to…

Cyrano “likes” Roxanne?

Would Juliet have clicked “Like” after viewing Romeo’s countenance? Or would she have used the long form:

Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’;
And I will take thy word. Yet, if thou swear’st,
Thou mayst prove false. At lovers’ perjuries,
They say Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.

And how about this passage?

What longing!
What fearing!
To see her,
what desire!
The crash that I heard
behind me
was Death’s
door closing:
now once more it stands
wide open,
the sun’s beams
have burst it open;
with wide open eyes
I had to emerge from Night
to seek her,
to see her;
to find her,
in her alone
to expire,
to vanish
has it been granted to Tristan.

Had Tristan simply indicated he “Likes” Isolde, Wagner’s opera would have been curtailed by about five hours.

If this post appeals to you click “Like”.  Or send me a comment of 250 words or more.

Richard Curtis

Years ago the girlfriend of a married politician came to me with a proposal for a tell-all. Because of the explosive nature of the revelations the paranoid author insisted that editors read the material in their offices and hand it back to us when we left.

You would think that gazing at editors while they read would be as exciting as unraveling a knitted sweater. In fact it turned out to be a deeply enlightening experience. Some editors tossed each page carelessly on the floor after completing it; others shuffled each completed page to the rear of the stack and stopped to tamp it all neatly down. One scanned the proposal in a minute or two; another read it moving his lips.

Unfortunately, I had to be content with watching editors read, because the author chickened out and the book never got sold.

I was reminded of that caper when I read that Little, Brown, publisher of Those Guys Have All the Fun, a red-hot expose about hijinks at ESPN, had so tightly embargoed the content that the author all but manacled the manuscript to his wrist, writes Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. “I couldn’t get another one to give to my mother for Mother’s Day,” says author James Andrew Miller.

The publisher took similarly stringent measures in offering the book to magazine editors for possible serialization, compelling them to read it in Little, Brown’s offices after signing a confidentiality agreement. It seems to have worked, as not a word of it has leaked to anyone’s knowledge, perfectly preserving its blockbuster impact until release of the book on May 24th in the midst of Book Expo America.

When you realize before how many pairs of eyes a manuscript passes from the time it is delivered by the author to its first public airing, you will appreciate how fiendishly difficult it is to maintain a leakproof “embargo”, to use the publishing term.  The manuscript must be shared by the editor with a small army of potential spoilers: editorial colleagues and executives, attorneys, copyeditors, proofreaders, sales and publicity and marketing and promotional people, printers, magazine editors, and book reviewers.  Even if we did not live in a media-driven age where secrecy is harder to preserve than the bald eagle, the protection of a book’s naughty if not nasty secrets would be all but impossible.  So it is to Little, Brown’s credit that they somehow did it.

You can get a glimpse of the content in Secrecy Breeds Curiosity Over an ESPN Exposé, but to publishing professionals it isn’t half so interesting as how Little, Brown kept it so perfectly under wraps.

Richard Curtis

Anxious exhibitors and attendees of next week’s Book Expo America are scrambling to draw up contingency plans to move to another venue in case predictions of Judgment Day, set for the Saturday before the book fair opens, turn out to be accurate.

Though countless end-of-the-world prognostications have not materialized to date, this one, posited by Biblical authorities, is disturbingly convincing. The End Times theorists have calculated a precise timeline from Creation, which they date at 11,013 BC, to final destruction on May 21, 2011. That spells bad news for attendance at BEA,which has been flagging for several years.  “The last thing we need is an apocalypse,” said one Expo executive. Unfortunately, conference organizers and the brass at International Digital Publishing Forum were not aware of the projections, ignored them or failed to take them seriously.  This misjudgment may cost dearly, as few insurers cover exhibitors for losses or damages incurred when Kingdom comes.

There is a slim possibility that some publishers or visitors will be spared. According to the Doomsday website, “God declares that only a remnant, a relatively small number of people, will be saved.”  Here, thanks to their deep pockets and abundant resources, Big Six publishers like Random House and HarperCollins, and large retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, have a better chance at salvation than small presses and independent bookstores, who fear that we may see another round of consolidation by major companies at the expense of smaller ones.

There is also a small window of hope that the prediction is premature. Convention organizers researching the matter think that the prophets may have confused Saturday’s cataclysm with the one predicted for 2012 in Mayan scriptures.  BEA-goers will breathe a huge sigh of relief but will think twice about attending next year’s bookfest.

Not all publishers are preoccupied with The World to Come. One exhibitor we spoke to said “Rapture?  Screw Rapture. If my goddamn books don’t arrive from the warehouse I’m gonna freak out.”

What do you think? Comments submitted after the world ends will not be considered.

Doomsday details here. Exhibitors and attendees are advised to check the BEA website for updates.

Richard Curtis

Janet Dailey’s American Dreams and its sequel Legacies follow the sorrowful train of the Cherokee nation after it is wrenched from its native home and resettled on an alien territory.

In the first, set in the 1830s, two proud Cherokees, a Southern belle and a landowner called The Blade share a passion for their people that bursts into a passion for each other. As pressure mounts for resettlement, one lover wants to stay to protect the Cherokee way of life, the other vows to join them on the death march that is to become the infamous Trail of Tears.

Originally published as The Proud and the Free, American Dreams brims with historical tragedy and unwavering courage. You cannot help but be moved by this intense story of passion and hope.

But that is only half the story. Legacies advances the story two decades as the looming Civil War looms threatens to tear the nation apart…and draw the Cherokee people into the maelstrom. Old hatreds have festered between the two sides ever since the Trail of Tears. Now, the split between the Confederacy and Union offers a perfect excuse for these prideful men to re-bloody their hands.

Diane Parmelee, the beautiful daughter of a Union officer, finally has the chance to marry the love of her life, the handsome, Harvard-educated Lije Stuart. But, despite his love for Diane, Lije’s allegiances lie with his plantation-owning Cherokee family and, in turn, the Confederacy.

Further clouding Lije’s heart, the war reignites a feud within the Cherokees, specifically that of Lije’s father, whose name is…The Blade.

Can Diane’s pleas for compromise save Lije from the horrors of war? Can true love reach across divided loyalties and blind honor?

Previously published as American Destiny, Janet Dailey’s Legacies serves as a stunning follow-up to her American Dreams and proves that passion and pride can be as explosive as cannon fire.