“Next time you visit London,” we wrote back in 2009, “if you have an hour or two after visiting London Bridge, Westminster Palace and Big Ben, drop by a solicitor’s office and sue someone for libel. It will more than pay for the cost of your vacation.” We were describing the infamous British libel laws that merely require a plaintiff to show that a statement harms his reputation and put the burden of disproof on the defendant to show that his allegations were not libelous.  This has made London a breeding ground for libel lawsuits. Can’t Sue for Libel in the US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World

This legal travesty may at long last be reversed. A bill is making its way through Britain’s Parliament “is intended to abolish costly trials by jury in most libel cases, curb online defamation through a new notice and takedown procedure, reduce so-called ‘libel tourism’ and make it more difficult for large corporations to sue newspapers.”

Not just newspapers: “The bill will rebalance the law to ensure that people who have been defamed are able to protect their reputation, but that free speech and freedom of expression are not unjustifiably impeded by actual or threatened libel proceedings,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice.

Details in Queen’s speech launches overhaul of libel law (guardian.co.uk)

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published by Digital Book World as What is So Fair as a Libel Suit in May?

She was his first love and he was willing to overlook her imperfections at the time. Though she could be charming, cultured and articulate, she was also dowdy and old-fashioned in tweeds and sensible shoes, unworldly and inclined to tedious intellectualism. But she was richly endowed and ripe for the plucking, And pluck her he did, first seducing her, then playing fast and loose with her heart, tormenting her with infidelities as he relieved her of her fortune.

Then he found a new fascination, charismatic, classy, fashionable and rich. He succumbed to her irresistible allure. Only one question remained: Would he throw his first love over?

This is the metaphor that may have occurred to some Amazon-watchers when they read that the behemoth retailer is launching an initiative in the high-end clothing business that resonates with its original efforts to revolutionize publishing.

“Having wounded the publishing industry, slashed pricing in electronics and made the toy industry quiver,” Stephanie Clifford wrote in the New York Times, ”Amazon is taking on the high-end clothing business in its typical way: go big and spare no expense…In the retail clothing world, fears are growing that few will be able to compete with a stepped-up Amazon.”

Though we in the book industry consider our little corner of the media to be glamorous, compared to the fashion field it is lackluster, unsophisticated and impecunious. Looking at it through the eyes of a shrewd businessman, the profit margin on high-end sales – even with free shipping and returning – beggar those of the book industry.”Gross profit dollars per unit will be much higher on a fashion item,”said Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the shrewdest businessmen on the face of the Earth. Bezos was Honorary Chairman at the glam opening of a classic costume exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. See New York Social Diary for photos of him with Vogue fashionista empress Anna Wintour.

Will the more precious commodity drive the cheaper one of Bezos’s attentions and affections? Keeping our Eternal Triangle metaphor in mind, read the Times‘s article and judge for yourself. Amazon Leaps Into High End of the Fashion Pool

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Will Amazon Grow Bored with Publishing?

Sourcebooks’s Vice President and Editorial Director Todd Stocke issued a bulletin to colleagues in the publishing industry reporting record-breaking sales and exciting initiatives in the traditional and digital space.  Coming just before Book Expo America convenes, it will certainly burnish the company’s reputation as an industry leader.

The text is below, but not hotlinked.

Richard Curtis

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Dear Friends -

Two weeks ago I watched our accounting department process the largest (by far) batch of royalty checks in our history, and I wanted to take the opportunity to say thanks to all of you. This year Sourcebooks celebrates 25 years since its one-book founding out of publisher Dominique Raccah’s home. Today we publish 300+ new titles a year across a breadth of categories we never imagined. We have more than 2,000 titles in print from 1,700 remarkable authors. We’ve celebrated 27 New York Times bestsellers and more than 50 national bestsellers. And that only happens with the support and partnership of people like you.

As many of you know, making publishing more transparent and less mysterious for authors, readers, and partners is part of our mission. To wit, some notes from our results in Q1 of 2012:

· Our sales continue to grow, up 17% in Q1 despite fewer retail storefronts. This is all coming off a standout 2011 that was once again the best in our history.

· Although industry news is reporting a marked flattening of ebook sales (up 9.9% in February), ours are up 73% over prior year. Our marketing strength is a real asset in an ever-cluttered space for consumer discovery.

· Our print sales are up 3%. Yes, print, even in a Borders-less world.

· Our top 5 areas of sales are, in order: romance fiction; adult nonfiction; adult fiction; children’s books; young adult. It’s worth noting that we weren’t even in romance, children’s, and YA just 5 years ago.

As 2012 evolves, we continue to experiment on behalf of our authors.

· We recently launched an “online readers club” in the romance space called Discover a New Love that is generating some interesting news and data on what our readers are looking for, specifically experimenting in the areas of reader discovery and DRM (or the absence thereof) .

· “To free or not to free?” We’ve experimented and published some results on the impact of “free” promotions, and we’re seeing the results in this area change almost monthly.

· We’re testing an “agile publishing model” in adult nonfiction with Digital Book World headliner David Houle.

· As we have for 14 years, we’re continuing to deliver remarkable enhanced book experiences for readers – now entirely digital – and in the areas of poetry, adult nonfiction, and children’s books.

For those of you attending BEA this year, we’ll have several editors there and we’re looking for great new projects. Drop us a line, we’d love to see you! I’ll be there, as will Deb Werksman, Leah Hultenschmidt, Shana Drehs, Aubrey Poole, and Steve Geck. Who says publishers don’t bring editors to BEA anymore!

· You can find our catalogs online at www.sourcebooks.com/catalogs.html

· We recently overhauled our page for agents showing our acquiring editors and their interests. We hope you’ll find it to be much more thorough (plus photos!): http://www.sourcebooks.com/resources/editorial-contacts-for-agents.html

It’s been a remarkable 25 years for us. We’ve been able to do a lot of things we were told independent publishers couldn’t do. And we’re looking to continue to take leadership and drive innovation for authors in the next 25. We couldn’t have done it without all of you. We hope to hear from you soon!

Best Wishes,

Todd Stocke

Vice President, Editorial Director

Congratulations to recent New York Times bestselling authors Jill Mansell, Kristi Yamaguchi, Tim Bowers, Harlan Cohen, Grace Burrowes, Susanna Kearsley, Carolyn Brown, Mike Litwin and Jennifer Fosberry!

Our New York office has moved! The new mailing address is 232 Madison Ave., Suite 1100, New York, NY 10016. All phone, fax, and emails remain unchanged.

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Sourcebooks Reports Successful Year and Announces Initiatives

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Gigaom.com, reports a unique strategy for combating the practice known as “showrooming”.

In showrooming, customers enter a bookstore, browse, then select (or scan the barcode of) the book they want to purchase, walk out of the store and order it from an online bookstore. Which makes the independent store a mere display space for customers to order books from its competitors. Last Christmas Amazon actually promoted the practice, outraging indy stores. One got so mad it stopped doing business with the behemoth. (See Can You Survive without Amazon?)

Barnes & Noble, the highest-profile target of showrooming, is now in a position to fight fire with fire. Microsoft’s investment in B&N’s Nook business gives the bookstore chain the potential for a showroom that loops back to its own inventory via the Nook.

“B&N CEO William Lynch says that the company plans to embed NFC (near field communication) chips into Nooks,” reports Owen. “Users could take their Nook into a Barnes & Noble store and wave it near a print book to get info on it or buy it.”

It’s an interesting concept, but there’s a big flaw in the reasoning.  Showrooming enables customers to scan a high-priced book in a brick and mortar store, then buy it at a discount on an Internet store.  In other words, if you scan a $20.00 book in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, then go to B&N’s online store, you’ll be able to buy it for, say, $16.00.  Then why, you will ask, can’t I pay $16.00 inside the bookstore?

For a showroom to work properly you need two components: a physical space with physical books to browse; and a virtual space to actually buy them. Think of a library where physical books are on display for browsing only. Customers choose the titles they want, swipe a credit card, and wait a short time while the book is printed on an Espresso-type printer.

We’ve been buttonholing readers with this mad scheme for years, and you can see some of our postings about kiosks here.

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Showdown for Showrooms

Pea OD

Richard Curtis, literary agent and founder of E-Reads, the independent ebook publisher, recently posted an article on Digital Book World about print on demand. He was subsequently interviewed about it by GoodeReader.

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“E-Reads has been using Lightning Source for its POD services since we began in 2000. LSI is the biggest in the industry, perhaps in the world, in print-on-demand. Because they are a division of Ingram, a book distribution company that has very successfully made the transition from a company that serviced print publishers to a company that now services the digital book industry, we feel that there are advantages to being with LSI that you simply cannot get with any other POD publisher. Among other things, their core source service enables us to reach indie bookstores, a great many of which we could not otherwise reach.”

One aspect of POD that Curtis mentioned in his recent blog post is the prohibitive cost per book when comparing a typical print run of a trade paperback with the cost of printing one title at a time per customer request. Lightning Source has countered that cost in a deal with EPAC, one of the largest POD suppliers in Germany.

“From speaking to executives at LSI and asking if there is any possibility in the future that the costs of producing PODs might come down, they have told me that there are developments that they cannot currently discuss that make them hopeful that the prices will come down.”

But why such a keen interest in print-on-demand? Isn’t the point of digital publishing and the surge in popularity of e-reading related to all the negative things that digital has stripped away, like eliminating paper and ink costs, shipping costs, and wait times to receive new books?

“Many authors want their books available in paper and many readers still want to read books in paper even though they are available in digital format. I’m considered somewhat of a trailblazer in the digital world but I still much prefer to hold a printed book in my hand than to read one on a screen. Even though POD used to represent about 50% of our income in the days when there were no Kindles or Nooks or viable digital readers, POD now represents about 8% of E-Reads revenue, the rest being from digital. Even though POD books are very expensive compared to those printed in the traditional way. A book that might have been $12 to $15 in a traditional print run might cost $20 as a POD, but people are willing to pay it.”

While POD might be a smart move for the indie authors and a certain demographic of readers, whether the publishing industry as a whole will adopt POD as a viable solution remains to be seen.

“I think the industry is being forced into it. The closing of Borders and of so many independent bookstores, the reduction of floor space in bookstore chains like Barnes&Noble, all point to a reduction to the space available to deliver printed books to the consumer on the street. This same segment of the population is going to have to turn to POD. The publishing industry for the last 100 years has distributed its books on a returnable basis. At the beginning of the industry 5-10% of books were returned; now we’re up to as much as 50% of books being returned by bookstores. It’s no longer possible for publishers to sustain 50% returns when POD is an alternative.

“My vision for POD is kind of the Espresso vision, where the Espresso Book Machine will come down in size and complexity to where it will be truly closer to desktop than refrigerator sized. When that happens, you’ll see bookstores with kiosks with thousands of books displayed where you can choose one, but they’re not on a bookshelf, they’re on a screen. You can browse electronically, pick one out, and have a cup of coffee while it prints. It may not be in the immediate future, but I would say within the next ten years you will be able to go into a space and print the book you want. Right now, you have that by simply going on Amazon, but if you prefer the experience of going into a store and browsing for a book that looks interesting, you will see that model evolving. And when someone predicts 10 years, it’s usually five.”

Print-On-Demand: The Future of Publishing? A Talk with Richard Curtis
By Mercy Pilkington

To contemplate publishing books without partnering with Amazon is to lose a lot of sleep, weight,  hair or all of the above.  Luckily most of us steer well clear of any action that might provoke the behemoth to put the Big Chill on our Buy buttons.

To deliberately terminate one’s relationship with Amazon is almost inconceivable. Almost but not quite.  We have the example of an executive that did it and has lived to tell this David and Goliath tale.

His name is Randall White and he’s the head of a distributor called Educational Development Corporation that also has a publishing imprint of about 1800 titles like Everyone Poops and The Noisy Body Book. Now it is known as The Company that Opted Out of $1.5 Million in Amazon Sales. White simply got tired of Amazon’s practice of  buying EDC’s books from a distributor and drastically discounting them. “They were becoming showrooms for Amazon,” he complained to David Streitfeld, reporting his story for the New York Times (Daring to Cut Off Amazon).

White had another reason to be irritated.  His books are sold via a network of “independent sales agents,” ladies who market EDC books from their homes and were losing food off their table as a result of Amazon’s tactics. Seizing the “chance to make 7,000 women happy in one day,” he pulled the plug on Amazon, or perhaps Pressed Flush is a better metaphor. Yet he claims his firm is doing better than ever.

When we have more poop on EDC’s war with Amazon we’ll let you know.

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as David Poops on Goliath

“Is this a joke? Are we being punked?” That’s what we asked when we cautiously reprinted an alleged email thread setting up a dinner among executives of major publishing companies to discuss “The $9.99 Problem”, a coded reference to Apple’s entrance into the e-book business in competition with Amazon’s $9.99 e-book price ceiling. (See The Restaurant Wasn’t Kosher, and Neither Was the Conversation)

It looks like it was no joke.  The Justice Department’s brief against five publishers and Apple, accusing them of colluding to fix prices, alludes to “private meetings”. “Prior to the formation of and throughout Publisher Defendants’ agreement,” states the DoJ filing, “their CEOs and other high-level executives frequently communicated with each other in both formal and informal settings. From these communications emerged a pattern of Publisher Defendants improperly exchanging confidential, competitively sensitive information.” (If you’re a trial junkie you can read the complete brief here).

Though three publishers have settled with the government and two are fighting back, Apple’s role may hinge on whether Steve Jobs or another representative of Apple actually attended that dinner or any other group meeting of publishers to discuss pricing.  The legal principle seems to be that setting the same terms for everybody is fine if you deal with them unilaterally, but dealing with them as a group is conspiracy.

Says Bloomberg News: “Apple Inc.’s best defense against accusations it conspired to fix e-book prices may turn on its absence from meetings in Manhattan restaurants where publishing executives allegedly worked out the scheme.”

Details in Apple e-books defense may hinge on absence from dinner meetings

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Was Steve at the Table? If Not, DoJ Case against Apple Could Crumble

The Department of Justice’s suit against publishers and Apple introduced terms like “Collusion” and “Conspiracy” into the discourse of people whose legal vocabulary seldom ventures beyond the language of warranty and option clauses. The words are jarring enough to rattle teeth in the hushed corridors of one of the most civilized of professions.

And yet book publishers themselves are not wholly innocent of the practices that attracted the attention of the Justice Department. The scale of their malfeasances may be infinitely smaller (a Wall Street Journal writer described publishers as “plankton”) and the issues more prosaic, but there are occasions when “C” might stand for something more ominous than Coincidence.

Did you ever wonder for example where it is written that the “standard” hardcover royalty for a trade book is 10% of the retail price on the first 5,000 copies, 12 1/2% on the next 5,000, and 15% on all copies sold thereafter?  Why the “standard” e-book royalty offered by all major American publisher is 25% of net receipts?  Why the “standard” division of territories in the English-speaking publishing market is US and Canada for American publishers and the United Kingdom for British publishers?  Is it not wonderful how the same terms just seem to pop up on everybody’s boilerplate, and if one publisher changes its terms, the changes magically spring up overnight on everybody else’s, like mushrooms?

Of course, we recognize that boilerplate is made to be negotiated, and though almost all major publishers seem to be marching in lockstep, we know that many of their standard terms are flexible if you ask and if you have the clout to alter them. Nevertheless, a conspiracy theorist with a taste for the flesh of publishers (stringy fare at best) might be tempted to go after some if he thought a cabal was afoot.

In fact this very thing happened in 1974 when our old friend the United States Department of Justice brought suit again against twenty-one American publishers for their tacit consent to what appeared to be an unwritten treaty among British publishers to carve up the English-speaking book distribution market.

As the University of Chicago’s Library Quarterly explains it, “Claiming a group of about seventy countries as their ‘traditional market,’ signatories agreed to neither buy nor sell publication and distribution rights to American publishers unless the rights for that market remained intact in British hands. In effect, the worldwide English language book market became divided into two spheres, the British and the American. While this division worked reasonably well for many years, by the 1970s the system was crumbling under the pressure of worldwide changes in book production, distribution, and consumption.”

As a result of the DoJ’s antitrust suit, the so-called Traditional Market Agreement was ended.

Or was it?  Though the Consent Decree will be found in the legal archive of the 21 American publishers that signed it, if you negotiate a book deal with an American publisher today and ask for the traditional territory, I guarantee it will be identical to the one that prevailed until the DoJ threw a spanner in the works in 1974.

But maybe that’s just a Coincidence.

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as C for Coincidence?  Or Conspiracy?

In another coup for its book publishing enterprises, Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer imprint has acquired fourteen novels in Ian Fleming’s James Bond thriller series, plus two nonfiction books by Fleming.

If Amazon’s policy holds true the books will be carried exclusively on the Kindle e-reader.  As Publishers Lunch‘s Michael Cader points out, however, the news “brings attention again for Barnes & Noble, and whether they will carry the print editions. Since Amazon says the ebooks will be Kindle exclusives at the outset, and BN has already declined to carry titles from Amazon Publishing in their physical stores, the policy is unlikely to change.”

B&N has stated its position about Amazon Publishing’s books in no uncertain terms.

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Amazon’s Fleming Acquisition May Not Bond with B&N

Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books about the interrelationship of social and technological networks, was interviewed by Findings.com on the subject of social reading, the act of sharing books with other individuals and groups. Shirky’s views coruscate with insights and epigrams. But like a thriller movie that grips you while you watch it but does not hold up subsequently, some of Shirky’s glittering observations don’t quite withstand analysis.

But first the epigrams:

“Publishing is not evolving,” he says. “Publishing is going away.” As for the act of publishing itself, the complex and costly enterprise that brings books to readers,  “That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button.” That act “doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.” Given that digital technology enables us to print out the PDF of a book in our home or office, the only raison d’etre for the publishing industry today is to save its own jobs. “Publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand.”

Shirky is at his most interesting in addressing social reading, which stems directly from the universal need for readers to talk to somebody after reading a book. Until now, if you noted a thought-provoking passage in a book, your underline or highlight or marginal exclamation held no interest to anyone else – because it was unlikely it would ever be seen by anyone else. But now digital technology empowers us to communicate our response to scores, hundreds, thousands of people by simply enabling the social default on your e-book reader so that others reading the same e-book can see what captured your attention.”By switching to default public,” he says,”the aggregate value of that information is so much larger than anybody believed it would be in the 1990s.”

It’s on this point, however, that the thrust of Shirky’s bon mot engine starts to sputter. For, in order for a publicly shared comment to mean anything it’s vital to know the source of the comment. Take “Miles to go before I sleep”, an iconic line that is undoubtedly on every poetry lover’s bucket list.  If it was highlighted by undergraduate Joe Shmoe does that tell me anything about Frost’s poem? About Joe? Does it make me think differently about Robert Frost?

But if I were to learn that line was highlighted by, say, Dick Cheney or Angelina Jolie or Mike Tyson, I would certainly pause to wonder about the association.  “Cowards die many times before their death” is a Shakespearean cliche, yet when we learn that while imprisoned in South Africa Nelson Mandela wrote his name beside it we utter a thoughtful “Hmmm.” In March 2011 a symposium on “association copies” of books owned or annotated by famous authors provoked many such utterances when we learned what Abraham Lincoln said about Alexander Pope, or Walt Whitman about Henry David Thoreau. (See Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in Margins.) It’s only because it’s Lincoln or Whitman that the marginalia makes us sit up and take notice

But all in all Shirky is right: by making your own responses to a passage visible to all readers, you are “extending the radius and the half-life of its value.” Another gem of an epigram to take away from a thought-provoking interview.

How We Will Read: Clay Shirky

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as NYU’s Clay Shirky: “Publishing is Going Away”