Back in July 2009 USA Today began tracking Kindle bestsellers. Now the New York Times will provide an e-book bestseller list commencing early next year.  It will include not just Kindle sales but sales in all formats. We’re not sure how the listmakers will weight Kindle vs. iPad vs. Sony vs. Nook etc., and if the Times‘s secretive selection process for print book bestsellers is carried over, we’ll never know how it’s done for e-books, either. But you can try asking Janet Elder. She’s the editor at the newspaper tasked with surveys and analyses.

Julie Bosman, who covers the book biz eat for the Times, reports that the paper “will also redesign the section of its Sunday Book Review that features the best-seller lists.  She quotes Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review’s editor: “To give the fullest and most accurate possible snapshot of what books are being read at a given moment you have to include as many different formats as possible, and e-books have really grown, there’s no question about it.”

Details in Times Will Rank E-Book Best Sellers.

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.

Remember two years ago when we were on a death watch for the New York Times? “The New York Times is approaching the point where it will have to manage its business primarily to conserve cash and avoid defaulting on its debt,” wrote Henry Blodget on businessinsider.com. “This situation will only get worse as advertising revenue continues to fall, and it will be very serious by early next year.” Blodget’s piece was bleakly headlined New York Times Running on Fumes. Things got so desperate the newspaper had to borrow a quarter of a billion from a Mexican mogul at extremely disadvantageous terms – 14% interest.

Last week the Times‘s business section carried this story: “The New York Times Company intends to pay back a $250 million loan from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú in early 2012, three years ahead of its due date.

Que pasó?

For one thing the Times dumped its wholly owned Boston Globe and slashed its debt by one-third, from $1.1 billion to $670 million. For another, the economy began to pick up and advertising revenue, every newspaper’s lifeblood, began to flow again, though not at pre-recession levels.  The paper’s website, though falling short of the paywall created by rival Wall Street Journal, has become dynamic, entertaining and accessible, and ad revenue on the site was up 14% in the third quarter of 2010. The digital version of the paper is available on a growing number of e-devices, generating income more efficiently than the profit-draining paper edition.

Though we don’t want to read too deeply into the Times‘s turnaround, it might presage a reversal of the decline in all paper reading formats – newspapers, magazines and books – as readers return to the pleasures of paper and discover the limitations of digital formats (see Students Give E-Textbooks a Failing Grade).

Read the AP story in full here.

Richard Curtis

After warning e-poachers to keep their mitts off its books (see Random House Serves Notice on Would-be E-Interlopers) Random House agreed to let the William Styron estate place e-book rights to some of the late author’s books with recently formed independent e-book company Open Road Integrated Media.

It was speculated that Random’s threat last winter, advising authors they were “precluded from granting publishing rights to third parties that would compromise the rights for which Random House has bargained,” had been provoked by Open Road’s announcement that it had reached agreement with the Styron estate. So it is puzzling that Random yielded to the very same company without a fight. Motoko Rich, writing the story up in the New York Times, seems to suggest that the accommodation was achieved by friendly persuasion stemming from warm feelings between the company and the estate.

Random’s Stuart Applebaum, however, asserted that “The decision of the Styron estate is an exception to these discussions. Our understanding is that this is a unique family situation.” Whether the publisher will be moved by similar auld lang syne appeals from other authors is an intriguing question. But Random has not made it easier on itself by making an exception to its own stern rule.

Read Rich’s story in detail: Random House Cedes Some Digital Rights to Styron Heirs

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.

About three weeks ago Randy Cohen, the Sunday New York Times columnist who guides the morally perplexed in a feature called “The Ethicist”, told a supplicant that there was nothing unethical about downloading a pirated e-book version of a Stephen King novel so that he would not have to lug the heavy hardcover around on a journey.

Cohen’s grounds for blessing the customer’s patronage of the pirate site were that the legitimate e-book version was not yet available, and besides, the customer had paid for the hardcover and was therefore entitled to help himself to whatever e-book was at hand, which in this case happened to be a stolen one.

Though we think of ourselves as judicious we reacted to Cohen’s advice with unwonted intemperance. We were almost unanimously supported by a host of indignant people, many of them authors who had no need of an ethics counselor to distinguish between right and wrong. However, one author, John Scalzi, took exception and defended The Ethicist. Scalzi’s rationale goes like this: “You bought the book once and I got paid once; after that if you get the book in some other format for your own personal use, and I don’t get paid a second time, eh, that’s life.”

We’ve had three weeks to review all the comments and reflect on the position put forth by the Cohenim and Scalzistas in the hope of finding some redeeming values that we overlooked in our initial hotheaded reaction. We’re sorry to report that we have found nothing to alter our sense that their views are pernicious and stupid. (Oops! There we go being intemperate again.  There must be something about apologists for piracy that brings out the mean spirit in us.)

Our feelings about all this were reinforced by an eloquent comment submitted by Tony Burton, a writer and publisher of Wolfmont Press. As we’re not content to let this issue disappear from our front page we’re printing it in full below with Mr. Burton’s permission.

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My first thought is, if this is an ethicist speaking, then the blind truly are leading the blind.

Situational ethics. It’s OK to do something wrong in certain situations. So, it’s OK to speed way over the posted limit if… what? If you are late for an appointment? If you are fleeing from a raving lunatic? If you have to catch a plane? Breaking the law, breaking the established rules, just because it makes life more convenient for you is unethical. As someone else noted, just because I have purchased a ticket to see a movie does not make it legal or ethical for me to secretly videotape the movie while I am in the theater.

As to the comment that “you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability,” what malarkey. Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps the level of acceptability of “the Ethicist” is so low that just about anything meets it, as long as apparent and immediate harm are not seen. It’s not unethical, then, to throw a single candy wrapper out the window. And if everyone who eats a Snickers bar thinks that way, the landscape will be plastered with wrappers. It is an insidious way of thinking, that “it does no apparent harm, or so little harm, so if it is convenient for me it must be OK even if it is illegal.”

It’s OK to steal a little bit. It’s OK to tell just one racist or homophobic joke, every once in a while. It’s OK to view child pornography in the privacy of your own home because, hey, you didn’t pay for it… just managed to find it on a file-sharing network and after all, it’s not YOU who coerced that child into doing those things, and even if you hadn’t downloaded it, the child would already have been molested anyway, right?

Yes, I’m being extreme. I’m being extreme because it’s too easy to accept unethical behavior when you candy-coat it. Call it what it is: dishonest, immoral, illegal, and UNETHICAL. That anyone intelligent is able to rationalize it into something else is somewhat frightening, because it is so easy to move from this sort of “harmless” theft to something worse, and every time you succeed in convincing yourself that you are OK, that you are in the right, it just makes it that much easier to do something more heinous. And that someone in such a position, writing for the NYT where so many thousands of people can use his words to justify their own unethical behaviors… it is reprehensible.

Tax filing deadlines are a source of anxiety for most citizens but few wring their hands as much as freelancers as they wrestle with such line-items as deduction of contraceptive devices (for research on relationship books) and charging off bathrooms where notes for novels are composed.

Sam Potts has created a Form 1040-Scrimp to guide freelancers in their preparation. It’s called A Tax Form for the Marginally Employed and you can find it in the Op-Art section of the New York Times. For instance, those claiming an area of their homes dedicated to writing can take advantage of the 98.4% Doormat Deduction.

If it sounds like your leg’s being pulled, see Potts’s freelancer’s tax form. If you’d like some straight skinny on how freelancers can deal with taxes, click here.

We figure we used at least 56 megawatts of electricity to compose this posting and we will enter it on Form 1040-Scrimp as soon as the electric company provides a receipt.

RC
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.

Below are comments by Frances Grimble of Lavolta Press on the controversy triggered by NY Times Ethicist Randy Cohen’s support for a reader who downloaded a book from a pirate website (See our original blog on Cohen here). Ms. Grimble’s remarks were posted in the comments box but as we feel they shed particularly bright light on the issues we decided they deserve their own posting.

Ms. Grimble did not provide the accompanying image.

RC

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Part 1
It’s a lot easier to just sit down and read a paper book page by page, than to scan it page by page and then go through it page by page again on an e-reader. I just don’t believe that many people would want to read a book in e-form so very much that they will scan a paper book they paid for, without also transferring that scan to other people. Pirates often do so for praise by their social groups, by the way.

It is also a false assumption that every book will be released as an e-book, or should be released as an e-book. Therefore, it is false to comfortably soothe your morals and other people’s by _claiming_ you’ll buy the e-book “when it comes out” and that you are merely “time-shifting.” Books sell in different quantities in different formats–hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, e-book, audio book. The publisher needs to produce the format(s) and quantity(ies) suitable for that particular book’s contents, and that will make back the costs and overhead, and that will pay the author, and that will generate enough profit to keep the business going. There are many books that simply cannot work as mass-market paperbacks, and there are also many books that simply cannot work as e-books. Furthermore, the publisher often does not even decide/plan whether to issue a book in a given format until another format has been on the market for awhile.

Most cheap e-book advocates conveniently assert that writers work for fun, not money. Not true. Writing at a professional level is very hard, very time-consuming, often money-consuming work. Even if it’s enjoyable much of the time, so are most other professions for the people who pursue them. Writers need and deserve to make a living just like members of other professions.

Publishing is very expensive. Everything-ought-to-be-an-e-book advocates conveniently sweep away the costs of editing, proofreading, indexing, photography, illustration, graphic design, page layout, cover design, publicity, marketing, accounting, legal services, computer equipment, office overhead, travel, and other expenses. It’s not all the print run by a long shot.

E-book advocates also pass around this meme that publishers have “always opposed” the borrowing of books, or the sale of used books, or something. Actually, I’ve never seen any data to back this up. In any case, what we are talking about is now, not what somebody might have said when Andrew Carnegie was opening his first library. The issue is one of quantity/degree. Publishers do lose sales when books are lent and they do lose sales of new books when used ones are sold. And they do lose sales of books when readers photocopy library copies.

The fact that many publishers and authors have financially survived the reading of such books does not mean they can survive e-book piracy _in addition_. Amateur piracy does count. If everyone makes just one copy for one friend, that’s 50% of the book sales lost. It’s all an issue of quantity/unit sales; so it’s false to assert that everyone survived photocopy piracy so they can now survive e-book piracy.

Part 2
I do believe in effective DRM, but none is available yet for e-book readers. Yes, anyone can copy a book with a ream of paper and a pencil, but the easier it is to pirate, the more people do it–and the more acceptible they think it is, because the publisher did not try to prevent it. Even more, however, I believe in not publishing e-books at all in the current climate of piracy.

Pirates often assert that publishers “insult their customers,” by using DRM and by court prosecution of piracy. However, someone who steals or passes on stolen goods is not a customer. Furthermore, I can tell you from experience that it is not “fun” for a writer to have readers assert that books–even though they’re worth reading and copying page by page–are not worth paying for. Or to see them issue threats on Internet groups that if they don’t like the price or format they’ll just steal the book by one means or another. It’s not fun to hear them assert that publishing is just a “failed business model,” and that writers and publishers should just go do something else, who cares what.

It’s not fun to hear people who know nothing about the business assert that it unnecessary to print books and that that is the only cost. It’s not fun to hear them assert that “publishers can always sell ads.” Supporting publications with advertising is now a failed business model. Look how badly most newspapers and magazines are doing, because people are not buying enough ads to support publication–even on the publications’ websites.

To me, as a writer and publisher, readers who denigrate the very books they simultaneously demand as some kind of right, and who either assert the right to steal them or who make all kinds of thin, roundabout excuses for stealing, are not customers I want. They are not readers I want. People who really value books cherish them and pay for them. They do not insult them and steal them.

Part 3
When someone has the right to sue you, it’s the law that matters–not what you feel ethically is OK. When you pirate, you risk getting sued by the copyright holder. If you are sued and you lose, you take the consequences–you may well end up paying tens of thousands more in damages and legal fees than you’d have paid for a legitimately bought book.

Therefore endless gyrations and arguments regarding what you personally morally feel is OK are pointless.

Last September we raised a question about e-books that nobody else seemed to be asking: when comparing the impact of supposedly “green” e-books to tree-killing paper books, why isn’t anybody talking about the health and environmental price? (See Getting Rid of E-Trash? Dump it on Asia’s Poor.)

At last someone has picked up that ball.  Daniel Goleman, author of Ecological Intelligence, and Gregory Norris, who is developing a life-cycle assessment software system, have evaluated the comparable impact of e-readers to printed books in an op-ed article in the New York Times. “To find the answer,” they write, “we turned to life-cycle assessment, which evaluates the ecological impact of any product, at every stage of its existence, from the first tree cut down for paper to the day that hardcover decomposes in the dump. With this method, we can determine the greenest way to read.”

It may come as a surprise to digital evangelists that their tree-saving e-gadgets are doing more harm than the traditional reading device known as the book. By some criteria, far more harm.

Goleman and Norris used 6 factors to assess the comparable impacts and their conclusions can be summarized as follows:

• Materials “One e-reader requires the extraction of 33 pounds of minerals…[and requires] 79 gallons of water. A book made with recycled paper consumes about two-thirds of a pound of minerals…[and] just 2 gallons of water.”
• Manufacture An e-reader consumes 100 kilowatt hours of fossil fuels that throw off 66 pounds of carbon dioxide, compared to 2 kwh and less than 1 pound of greenhouse gases.
• Health “The adverse health impacts from making one e-reader are estimated to be 70 times greater than those from making a single book.”
• Transportation “You’d need to drive to a store 300 miles away to create the equivalent in toxic impacts on health of making one e-reader — but you might do that and more if you drive to the mall every time you buy a new book.”
• Reading “If you like to read a book in bed at night for an hour or two, the light bulb will use more energy than it takes to charge an e-reader, which has a highly energy-efficient screen. But if you read in daylight, the advantage tips to a book.”
• Disposal For very different reasons e-readers and printed books end up tied in this category.

The final (and shocking) tally? “With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.”

For details read How Green Is My iPad?

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.

David Pogue, the wonderful blogger who tells technology like it is for the New York Times, has weighed iPad in the balance and found it not wanting.

He’s also weighed it on a scale and found it heavy compared to Kindle, 1.5 pounds vs. 10 ounces. But that is not a fatal factor in his evaluation.  In fact there are no fatal factors in his evaluation.  His biggest reservation is the fundamental concept of the iPad itself: why does the iPad exist? At first we were mystified by this enigmatic, existential question. But like a koan the answer came the next day.  More on that in a moment.

Pogue’s approach to appraising Apple’s tablet is divided in two: one column for geeks and one for shleppers.  We take umbrage at the distinction, because it doesn’t give much credit to a generation of lay users who are quite conversant with computer specs.  In fact this shlepper didn’t see anything so complex in Pogue’s “techie” section that could not be comprehended by an English major who did his Master’s thesis on Henry James.

Here are some highlights of Pogue’s analysis:

• There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces).
• When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience
• Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast
• The iPad can’t play Flash video…Thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad
• There’s no multitasking…It’s one app at a time
• The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience
• A great AT&T cellular deal
• 150,000 existing iPhone apps run on the iPad and 1000 specially designed for the iPad’s bigger screen

We said Pogue likes the iPad with an asterisk, but besides cavils like weight and glare, his specific reservations are so modest we won’t bother to reprint them here.  You can read them on Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Pogue’s glowing bottom line is this: “The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged and the young; they’re absolutely right.”

So – what does Pogue mean when he says the iPad is a hit except for the concept? The answer came in an article by Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller published in the Times the next day. “Many consumers do not understand the device’s purpose, who would want to pay $500 or more for it and why anyone would need another gadget on top of a computer and smartphone. After all, phones are performing an ever-expanding range of functions, as Apple points out in its many iPhone commercials.” A banker commented that “I can do everything on my MacBook Pro, cellphone and BlackBerry. I don’t need any more devices. I already have six phone numbers and enough things to plug in at night.” A Silicon Valley entrepreneur was quoted as saying “But let’s see: you can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for.”

But that very same entrepreneur said “The first five million will be sold in a heartbeat.” Not very enigmatic or cosmic, but until something comes along to top the iPad, this would seem to be the last word.

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.

Randy Cohen writes the “Ethicist” column for the Sunday edition of the New York Times, in which he offers solutions to moral dilemmas for people who have a hard time figuring out for themselves the difference between right and wrong.

In the issue of April 4 2010, a reader posed the following dilemma:

I bought an e-reader for travel and was eager to begin “Under the Dome,” the new Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, the electronic version was not yet available. The publisher apparently withheld it to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y.

The preeminent ethicist’s solution? “In this case,” he pronounces, “it is not unethical.”

His reasoning? “Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.”

We’re sure this advice will warm the hearts of authors and book publishers desperately fighting to protect their literary properties from pirates and the ethical pygmies stealing e-books under the information-wants-to-be-free banner. (See I Want My E-Book and I Want It Now – Or Else!)

These dirtbags now have a champion in Randy Cohen. Go on, help yourself. The author and publisher have been paid once and don’t need to be paid for another edition of the same book.  While you’re at it, rip off the book club and the mass market paperback editions.

Cohen’s exculpation of this morally challenged idiot buying an e-book from a pirate site is the equivalent of condoning the purchase of black market goods from a fence. Does anybody know what Talmudic tractate he consulted to justify stealing – to describe it as “illegal” but not “immoral?” If so, we invite you to submit chapter and verse.

Though Cohen’s column and photo are undoubtedly protected by copyright and we may be flouting copyright law by reprinting them in full here, his moral position has liberated us to do just that. If he and the Times‘s attorneys want to take issue with us, we will refer them to his disgusting perversion of morality spelled out in Exhibit A below.

Richard Curtis

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The Ethicist

E-Book Dodge by Randy Cohen

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

Unsurprisingly, many in the book business take a harder line. My friend Jamie Raab, the publisher of Grand Central Publishing and an executive vice president of the Hachette Book Group, says: “Anyone who downloads a pirated e-book has, in effect, stolen the intellectual property of an author and publisher. To condone this is to condone theft.”

Yet it is a curious sort of theft that involves actually paying for a book. Publishers do delay the release of e-books to encourage hardcover sales — a process called “windowing” — so it is difficult to see you as piratical for actually buying the book ($35 list price, $20 from Amazon) rather than waiting for the $9.99 Kindle edition.

Your action is not pristine. Downloading a bootleg copy could be said to encourage piracy, although only in the abstract: no potential pirate will actually realize you’ve done it. It’s true that you might have thwarted the publisher’s intent — perhaps he or she has a violent antipathy to trees, maybe a wish to slaughter acres of them and grind them into Stephen King novels. Or to clog the highways with trucks crammed with Stephen King novels. Or perhaps King himself wishes to improve America’s physique by having readers lug massive volumes.

So be it. Your paying for the hardcover put you in the clear as a matter of ethics, forestry and fitness training.

In the three years that we’ve been blogging we’ve urged you to read books and articles that we thought interesting, but we’ve never presumed to order you to read something.

There’s always a first time, and an article by Michiko Kakutani in the March 21, 2010 New York Times has inspired us to resort to the imperative case.  Ms. Kakutani is the Pulitzer Prizewinning reviewer for the Times, a job she has performed with distinction for almost three decades, and in her penetrating essay Texts without Context she has captured our zeitgeist in a way that few other brief examinations of contemporary culture that we’re aware of have done.

Our zeitgeist not a pretty sight. But if you want to understand who you are and where you fit into 21st century civilization, we herewith direct you to read and reflect on what Ms. Kakutani has to say.

Her ruminations take the form of an overview of books about the influence of the Web on art and entertainment. “These new books” she writes, “share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.”

We find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. Ms. Kakutani’s essay is about the transformation of our culture from an immersive one (like losing yourself in a good book) to a cut-and-paste one. If we extract some gems to tempt you to read her article, doesn’t that make us guilty of the very sin of cutting and pasting that is the essence of what’s gone wrong in our culture? But if we don’t paste some gems from her essay, can we trust you to thoroughly read her argument?

Okay, we trust you. Immerse yourself in Texts Without Context and have your report on our desk first thing in the morning.

Richard Curtis