From Harry Potter-style mega-hits to controversy over banned books to hot competition for literary prizes, there is never a dull moment in the book world. Chapter & Verse keeps readers up-to-date on the latest in literary headlines. Check in with us daily to learn about books and their people - those who write them and those who love them.
Guest blog: Espresso print-on-demand machines jolt the book business
The Internet took a lot of the thrill out of book collecting. The fun of finding a much-wanted rarity after years of prowling used bookstores was replaced by an instant search and, usually, an equally instant find.
Now that the hunt is no longer the main point of the hobby, though, it returns to what probably should have been its main focus all along: enjoying the books that we can now so easily acquire. With digitizing projects and print-on-demand technology, older or obscure books are becoming not just available, but – in instant new editions – affordable. They don’t come with yellowed pages or leather bindings, the sensory touches that make my collector’s heart race, but the parts that matter still remain.
At Third Place Books just outside Seattle, the lead employee for that store’s print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine is chronicling this new chapter in the suddenly swift-moving world of publishing. Most recently, he wrote about how the store printed stacks of a Haitian Creole-English dictionary to be sent to medical workers responding to the Haiti earthquake. I’ve been following with interest his accounts of the older books customers are requesting, like “Walking: a fine art as practised by Naturalists and explained by Original Contributions to this Volume, and by Quotations from the published works of those who Love to dally along country lanes.”
Another Seattle bookstore just acquired the Espresso Book Machine, and the city’s alt-weekly, The Stranger, pointed me to this blog post from a bookseller on the positive changes it could bring to the industry. “Think of it: all the books that Helene Hanff had to write to 84 Charing Cross Road [about] in the sometimes vain hope of her booksellers finding affordable copies for her, can now be reprinted in minutes!” he wrote. “I know, because the list of titles from Hanff's memoir was the first list of titles I checked for availability, and yes, they can all be had through the EBM!”
Of course, without the need for Hanff to write a faraway bookstore to search out those titles, there would have been no long, fulfilling relationship between Hanff and her booksellers, and no “84 Charing Cross Road” book of her own to chronicle those days. Like everything else in the world of books and technology, we give something up for every leap forward.
Rebekah Denn blogs at eatallaboutit.com.
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Are you a "silver scribbler"? It's never too late to become an author
At the age of 58, Penelope Fitzgerald – who had previously worked as a housewife and mother, in a bookstore, and as a teacher – published her first book, a biography of pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. Two years later, at the age of 60, she published her first novel, "The Golden Child," a book said to have been written to entertain her ailing husband.
Over the next five years she went on to publish five novels, and in 1979 – at the age of 62 – she won the prestigious Booker prize.
Who knows how many retirees have great books lurking within? That seems to be one of the ideas behind the Bookbite project launched by British reading charity Booktrust. The campaign is intended to encourage older people to engage more deeply with books – through reading, joining book clubs, and even writing their own.
Part of the impetus behind the program is the discovery – through a survey done on behalf of Bookbite – that today's Digital Age may have fostered a generation of "silver scribblers." The Bookbite survey of 1,162 readers over the age of 60 found that 55 percent said that the Internet was an important part of their lives and 31 percent were interested in going online to publish short stories and join book clubs.
A few years ago The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting story on the growing number of older people today encouraged – in part by easy access to word processors – to write their memoirs. This morning, the BBC, in reporting on the Bookbite project, cites Frank McCourt (who published first book "Angela's Ashes" at the age of 66) and Marina Lewycka (who was 59 when her debut novel, "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," was nominated for the Orange Prize) as examples of successful literary debuts later in life.
Last year, at the age of 63, social worker-turned author Gaynor Arnold also made it to the Orange Prize long list with her first novel, "The Girl in the Blue Dress."
And then of course there's Millard Kaufman. Admittedly, he had had earlier success in life as a screenwriter (much earlier – in the 1950s and '60s), but Kaufman was 86 when he began his first novel, "A Bowl of Cherries," and 90 when it was published to enthusiastic reviews. As Washington Post critic Ron Charles advised the rest of us while reviewing it: "Buck up. Here's a shot of adrenaline for middle-aged hopes."
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor.
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Hachette joins Macmillan in e-book pricing war
"We want the agency model" seems to be the message publishers are sending to Amazon as the e-book pricing war intensifies. All week the battle between Macmillan and Amazon as to how the e-tailing giant will price digital books has been raging. And now Hachette has joined the fray, with HarperCollins calling for negotiations as well.
That means that Amazon is now butting heads with three of the five biggest US publishers. It would seem that something's got to give – quickly.
Up until now, the Amazon model has been to sell many popular e-books at the subsidized price of $9.99. (The publisher is paid $15 and Amazon sells the high-profile books as loss leaders.) But publishers like Macmillan prefer the agency model proposed by Apple during the unveiling of its iPad last week. This would allow publishers to set their own prices, with a 30 percent commission going to the seller.
Early this week, Amazon announced that they would back down. But as negotiations between Amazon and Macmillan drag on, most Macmillan books are still not being sold by Amazon. And meanwhile some authors are wondering how many sales they will lose before a truce is declared.
"It’s scary," writes debut author Randy Susan Meyers in a blog post titled "Nightmare on Amazon Street." Her novel "The Murderer's Daughters" was published by St. Martin's Press (a Macmillan imprint) on Jan. 19. It's due for a big review any day now. But what happens if the review comes out and all those potential readers/buyers log on to Amazon only to discover that they can't get the book? Do they try Barnes & Noble? Do they check out their neighborhood bookstore?
Or do they forget and move on to something else?
According to Meyers, having your new book abandoned by Amazon is about like "having [your baby] thrown out of one of the major daycare facilities in the nation."
So what is she doing? Apart from sobbing, Meyers says she spends her time monitoring the situation in cyberspace. "I’ve been reading the tweets pinging back and forth in the virtual world, along with the few articles that have surfaced so far. There are pro-Amazon factions. There are pro-Macmillan factions. Pro-reader. Pro-consumer. Pro-frugalistas."
But, she wonders, how about the writers who simply want to see their books selling? "The helpless writers have no weapons (except words)," she points out, "despite having quite a dog in this fight."
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor.
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Do you love your e-reader? You are not alone
Would this be good news or bad for Steve Jobs and the new Apple iPad? A recent survey by NPD Group shows that most people who already own e-readers – 93 percent of the group queried – are either “very” or “somewhat" satisfied with them. Only 2 percent of the group of more than 1,000 e-reader owners surveyed said they were dissatisfied.
In the long run, it's probably good news for everyone connected with e-readers. (The survey did not reveal what kind of e-reader the users surveyed owned.)
"Both the display technology and available content on e-Readers are optimized for those interested in books," Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis at NPD, said in a statement.
However, as PCMag.com points out, the survey also indicates that the "good news for those entering the market" is that "though people are generally pleased with their e-book readers, they are still looking for improved features."
The improved features most often mentioned included more book title availability (mentioned by 42 percent of users surveyed), longer battery life (39 percent), and color screens (34 percent).
Three in 10 e-reader owners said that they also use devices like PCs and smart phones for reading e-books.
All of which would seem to add up to a big, wide, open field with plenty of eager consumers.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor.
Do you own an e-reader? Are you a happy customer – or are you still seeking improved features? When it comes to e-books, what features matter most to you? Join the discussion on Facebook.
Libel suit against John Grisham is dismissed
In 2006, John Grisham published "The Innocent Man," a nonfiction account of the 1982 murder of Debra Sue Carter, a cocktail waitress in Ada, Okla,, and the wrongful conviction of two men who – after spending more than a decade in jail – were eventually exonerated of the crime. The next year, the county district attorney and two investigators involved in that wrongful conviction filed a lawsuit against Grisham, charging that his book had defamed them and inflicted emotional distress on them.
But this week a federal appeals court in Denver dismissed the case. "Given that plaintiffs are public officials, they face an especially heavy burden in attempting to demonstrate libel," 10th US Circuit Judge Carlos Lucero wrote.
The case against Grisham, which included Grisham's publishers, two other authors who had written about the case, their publishers, and and Barry Scheck, founder of the New York-based Innocence Project, was originally filed in an Oklahoma City court. There, US District Judge Ronald White dismissed the case in no uncertain terms. "What two words best describe a claim for money damages by government officials against authors and publishers of books describing purported prosecutorial misconduct?" he asked in his ruling. "Answer: Not plausible."
The plaintiffs, however, pursued an appeal, and this week's ruling rejects that attempt. The plaintiffs had also charged that Grisham and the other defendants were motivated by their desire to abolish the death penalty.
In "The Innocent Man," Grisham writes of a “broken criminal system” and refers to “bad police work” and “lazy prosecutors.”
But the court did not find Grisham's unflattering portrayal of the plaintiffs to be libelous. Lucero stated in his ruling that official acts of public officers are "privileged" and "cannot be considered libelous unless the defendant makes a false allegation [that] the official engaged in criminal behavior.”
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor.
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From book to film and on to the Oscars
Hollywood has always owed a large debt to the skills of those who tell their stories in the shape of books. In any given year a fair number of the best US films were originally books. This year – when 10 films have been nominated for the best picture award – four of those come from books. They are "The Blind Side," "An Education," "Precious," and "Up in the Air." (Last year three of the five nominees – "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "Slumdog Millionaire," and "The Reader" – were inspired by novels.)
This year some of those books have had to migrate a bit of distance to transform themselves into films. Take "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game" by Michael Lewis, for instance. It was a nonfiction title published in 2006, the kind of book that critics like to call "literary journalism" and it was an analysis of the changing nature of football as much as it is the story of a remarkable player adopted by an unlikely family.
"An Education" comes from a memoir published last year by journalist Lynn Barber, who told the story of how, in 1960, at the age of 16, she was swept off her feet by a charming con man.
"Precious" was originally "Push," a debut novel published in 1996 by African-American poet Sapphire. This blistering story of incest and abuse did not come into the world quietly. It began life serialized in The New Yorker, and before it was even printed foreign rights had been sold in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Brazil. Its eventual trip to the big screen should surprise no one.
"Up in the Air," a novel by Walter Kirn, is a book that originally suffered from unfortunate timing. First published in 2001, this story of a man who loves commercial US airline flight appeared too close to 9/11 to make good pleasure reading for many Americans. Even when it was finally turned into a film, some readers expressed surprise, wondering how a story that takes place largely in one man's consciousness would adjust itself to the big screen. But it did. And now it only remains to be seen which of these adaptions – if any – goes on to take center stage come March.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor’s book editor. Look for more Monitor blogs, book reviews, and book news on Facebook.
Did J.D. Salinger's quest for anonymity make him all the more famous?
With J.D. Salinger’s death, the famous veil over his private life is finally lifting a crack and providing new insights into the man behind the books. Not new insights about the affair with the impressionable teenager, or about odd dietary habits – those were discussed years ago in separate memoirs by former lover Joyce Maynard and daughter Margaret Salinger.
Ironically, what we’re seeing now are the normal daily details of Salinger’s life. They’re not the stuff of scandalous memoir – but, until now, they’ve been protected even more devoutly.
Until last year, reported the Rutland Herald, “Salinger was a regular at the Hartland Congregational Church's roast beef suppers, arriving more than two hours early for the first seating. He would bring along back issues of the Times and sit with other, mostly older, early birds waiting for the doors to open so he could claim the same seat at the head of the table nearest the pie rack.” The Herald said that Salinger attended movies at Dartmouth and read at Hanover’s Howe Library. He handed out pencils for Halloween one year when he forgot to buy treats.
He could, The New York Times told us, regularly be spotted shopping at Price Chopper. The Boston Globe let us know that he ate at the Windsor Diner across the Connecticut River in Vermont, “his profile defined by lights inside as he sat in a window booth overlooking Route 5.”
None of this adds, of course, to our true knowledge of a man who so notably wanted to be unknowable. But it does have the odd effect of humanizing Salinger, bringing him back down from legend to mortal. It makes me wonder how aggressively the public would have sought after him all these years, almost as fascinated by his personal life as his work, if the stranglehold on revealing such facts had been lifted earlier. He had every right to try and maintain that curtain of secrecy, but it inflamed curiosity about him to even greater levels, granting him a double-dose of unwanted fame.
I wonder if in the end it caused more trouble than he gained in return.
Rebekah Denn blogs at eatallaboutit.com.
Amazon vs. Macmillan: The latest round in the book wars
Wow, book headlines are beginning to resemble the sports pages. Every day someone's declaring a new winner and a new loser. This morning the loser is purported to be Amazon, because the company backed down in an e-book pricing battle with Macmillan (one of the US's six largest publishers) and agreed to sell Macmillan e-books on its Kindle e-reader for $12.99-14.99, instead of the $9.99 price that Amazon favors.
But did Amazon really lose? In the short run, yes. This weekend Amazon and Macmillan faced down in a contest that, as The New York Times put it, had "the already anxious publishing industry on edge." Macmillan refused to agree to Amazon's $9.99 prices on bestsellers and many new hardcover releases, and Amazon responded by – temporarily – halting sales of Macmillan titles on its Kindle.
It was a dramatic move. After all, Macmillan includes some of the more successful imprints in US publishing, including Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador, St. Martins Press, and Tor Books. Take those off somebody's Kindle and they would notice the difference pretty quickly. Sloan Harris, codirector of the literary department at International Creative Management told the Times, “I think everyone thought they were witnessing a knife fight. And it looks like we’ve gone to the nukes.”
But now Amazon has – almost immediately, albeit reluctantly – backed down, telling its customers that "we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."
However, is that really such bad news for Amazon? Maybe, maybe not. There will be some unhappy readers, that's for sure. (Just check out some of the 7,259 comments posted so far this year at "Boycott anything over $9.99" on a Kindle discussion forum.)
But I'm more inclined to agree with Kindle forum poster Scott Nicholson who, in a discussion titled "Macmillan aftermath: Good news for almost everybody (for now)," pointed out that everybody gets something out of this one. Macmillan gets the prices it wants even as Amazon gets credit for having made a stand for lower prices.
As for readers, $12.99-14.99 is still a very good price for a bestseller and/or new release. And those to whom such a range seems excessive will only have to wait. It's not that the prices on these books will never come down – it just won't happen immediately.
And anyone promoting e-books has got to be thrilled about the way that all this fighting is keeping them in the headlines. As Nicholson puts it, "ebooks win, because this has been the single most-talked-about book news of the past few years, and brought ebooks to the mainstream. They undeniably exist now, and are important enough for corporations to war over. That is good news for readers everywhere, whether they go paper or plastic. More books, more diversity, more literacy, more stories, more education, and more joy."
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor’s book editor. You can follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/MarjorieKehe
Remembering J.D. Salinger
If you've been to high school in the US in the past 50 years, then you know his book. J.D. Salinger was not as prolific as many authors, but few could even dream of being as influential. Today, Salinger's son announced that, after years of life in seclusion, his father, author of the 1951 classic "The Catcher in the Rye," died yesterday at his home in Cornish, N.H. Salinger was 91.
After "Catcher in the Rye," Salinger went on to publish a handful of additional works, acclaimed by critics and fans alike – "Nine Stories" (1953), "Franny and Zooey" (1961) and "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters" (1963). But nothing else would capture the world's attention to quite the extent of "The Catcher in the Rye," with its alienated, disillusioned, prep school dropout narrator, Holden Caulfield.
An early obituary of Salinger credits "The Catcher in the Rye" with long- and wide-ranging impact. "Novels from Evan Hunter's 'The Blackboard Jungle' to Curtis Sittenfeld's 'Prep,' movies from 'Rebel Without a Cause' to 'The Breakfast Club,' and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege," writes Hillel Italie. "One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of 'The Graduate,' was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator."
For some decades now, "Catcher" has become standard fare in most US high schools. For at least two generations of us, reading the book is one of the indelible memories of 10th-grade English.
But in recent years, there have been debates over the book's continuing merit. While some young readers find Holden's struggles with the "phonies" of the adult world as fresh as ever, others say they cannot relate, and some teachers have questioned the value of insisting that today's kids need to interact with a fictive character rooted in the Manhattan of the 1950s.
At only six years younger than Holden, I am perhaps the wrong age to enter into such a debate. But I will share one memory.
About a decade ago, I was tutoring a New York City school kid who was failing English. Gary was certainly bright enough, but he hated to read. He despised fiction in particular, he told me, and could not bring himself to finish a single book assigned in English class. I met him just as he was encountering "The Catcher in the Rye."
To encourage Gary and keep him company, I bought a copy of my own and re-read the book for the first time in about 30 years. I wondered how it would read as an adult. To my surprise, I felt its poignant bite all over again. I wondered, however, what Gary would think.
At our next tutoring session, for the first time, he was sitting straight up at his desk. "I didn't know people wrote books like this," he said. In part, he meant the language – still surprising in a school book after 50 years. But on another level, he meant something more. "It talks about things that people really think about," he said.
By the time we met again, Gary had read more than the required number of pages and "Catcher" went on to become the first novel he ever finished. Later, his in-class essay on Holden's sense of alienation won him an A. By the time we hit the next novel – Stephen Crane's "Maggie: Girl of the Streets" – Gary had a brand-new confidence. He didn't like "Maggie" nearly as well, but he'd gotten the idea of reading.
He finished English that year with a B.
Gary's experience, of course, is just one story. But I can't help wondering how many times it was repeated over the course of half a century.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor’s book editor. You can follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/MarjorieKehe
iPad: Who will be the winners and who the losers?
The answer is yes. And it doesn't matter if you plan to spend all eternity doing all your reading in an oak-paneled library lined with leather-bound manuscripts. If you care about reading, the arrival of the iPad matters to you.
It matters to you because it impacts the book world. Within that world, there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers. But sooner or later we'll all be involved.
For the moment, here's the immediate score:
For book readers, a win. The iPad means more choice and that can only be good. For those who want it, the new device offers e-book readers a number of things that Amazon's Kindle, for instance, does not: a touch screen, a quicker page turn, a more appealing visual display, and a neat "shelving" system for displaying your books. It also, however, comes with a higher price tag, a back-lit screen (harder on the eyes), and a larger size (not larger than the Kindle DX, but larger than the earlier Kindles) which makes it less easily portable. Personally, I'm not trading in my perfectly train-and-subway-compatible Kindle – at least, not yet. But it does mean that, for the moment, readers of e-books have another good choice. And soon, competition will probably mean that all the best features of both will combine.
For book publishers, also a win. Apple is offering a different pricing system which will allow publishers more control. This is essential. E-books are clearly the wave of the future and publishers need to start finding a way to make the economics viable. Breaking Amazon's choke hold on the system should bring a wave of relief. There is still plenty of adjusting and rethinking to be done, but this seems to be a step in the right direction.
But for bookstores, a loss – potentially a huge one. If you are the kind of person who enjoys lying awake at night worrying about things, then quickly add bookstores to your list. Every step forward that e-readers take has to be a blow to bookstores. Whatever happens to the iPad, e-books still made a leap forward yesterday in terms of visibility, public interest and discussion, and coolness. How will your corner bookshop compete? I don't know. Things were already hard enough for them. And if you are someone who still enjoys regular, leisurely browses in bookstores – and don't feel that perusing books by tapping a touchscreen will ever be an adequate substitute for that experience – then you should be worried. Very worried.
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor’s book editor. You can follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/MarjorieKehe
