Amazon kindles a price war

It may not be the equivalent of the sans-coulottes rising en masse during the French Revolution or a student facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square, but there appears to be a grassroots uprising of sorts developing around the pricing of e-books sold through Amazon for use on their Kindle readers. According to Galleycat, a group of almost 250 Amazon users have initiated a boycott of Kindle titles priced at more than $9.99. These currently include bestselling titles such as The Secret, David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman, and the new novel by Harlan Coben.

There are currently 808 titles on Amazon with the “9 99 boycott” tag, including some (like Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer) that are sold at $9.99 on the nose.

Not surprisingly, most of the online commentary supports the rebellion: it’s another example of the people making their voices heard against the greedhead publishers and corporate behemoths. And to be fair, many of the arguments the boycotters are making have merit: Kindle e-books are not as permanent or as versatile as actual books (they can’t be marked up, lent out, or printed out), and there is a tradition of electronic content on the Web being priced more modestly than its physical counterpart (one reason why iTunes became so popular).

Still, it’s fallacious to presume that e-books don’t cost publshers anything to produce (even without the cost of paper, printing, and warehousing, there are acquisitions and editorial costs to be factored into the equation), and they are still getting gutted on their margins for regular books by sites like Amazon, which demand steep discounts on the titles they sell. Mark-ups for e-books may seem like price gouging on the part of publishers (and this may indeed be the case), but the bottom line is that this segment of the market is still negligible, and publishers need to make money if they want to survive. Perhaps the solution is to sell more e-books at a lower unit cost; whether or not the Amazon boycott has this effect remains to be seen.

Arrr! J.K. Rowling and John Grisham fall victim to pirates

Two of the planet’s bestselling authors, J.K. “I’ll kick Stephenie Meyer’s ass” Rowling and John Grisham, are among several authors whose books have apparently been illegally uploaded to a San Francisco-based website that promotes itself as “YouTube for books.” Scribd.com was launched by a couple of twentysomething Harvard students, and has since become an attraction for a reported 55 million visitors each month. While the site boasts a number of legal uses – the Obama campaign used it to upload policy material and thereby sidestep media filters – it now looks to have succumbed to the “Napster effect,” whereby copyrighted works are uploaded without permission and distributed for free.

An article in The Times online reports:

A search of Scribd by The Times yesterday found copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Ken Follett’s most recent novel World Without End among many bestselling titles, raising fears that the piracy affecting the music industry may have spread to books.

When presented with a list of links to various Harry Potter books, Neil Blair, J. K. Rowling’s lawyer at the Christopher Little literary agency, said that Scribd did not have permission “and what you have identified are infringing listings which we were aware of and actioning”.

The online culture of disseminating information online for free (Quillblog finds it interesting that the word “crib” appears in Scribd’s name) has also been taken on recently by The Globe and Mail‘s Peter Scowen. Scowen writes that the culture of “free” threatens the traditional means by which authors and other content creators earn their living, which seems irrefutable, but it’s open to debate as to whether the solution is to rage against the machine or try to adapt traditional methods of doing business to the new reality.

Scowen’s specific target is the upcoming Book Summit, “Giving It Away: Books, Business, and the Culture of Free.” The conference, sponsored by Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council, is an opportunity for publishers, writers, booksellers, and other interested parties to “learn about the opportunities, the pitfalls, the marketing techniques, the delivery methods, the creators, the readers” that can be tapped by properly utilizing the “culture of free.” The cost of the summit is $145.

King vs. Meyer

Wolfe and Irving, Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez, Amis and Barnes – those of us who love a good literary feud can now add to the list reigning horror author Stephen King, who lashed out at the upstart Stephenie Meyer in an interview with a reporter from USA Today – and threw in a few more barbs at James Patterson for good measure. Anyone who’s concerned that readers no longer engage with criticism should have a look at the comments section appending the story, which at the time of this writing was nearing 1,200 responses.

From The Guardian:

King compared the Mormon author to JK Rowling, saying that both authors were “speaking directly to young people”. “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good,” he told an interviewer from USA Weekend.

King also drew a comparison between Meyer and Perry Mason mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” he said, going on to criticise prolific thriller author James Patterson – “a terrible writer but he’s very successful” – and fellow horror author Dean Koontz, who although he “can write like hell”, is sometimes “just awful”.

Bookmarks: Bolano, Meyer, and more

• The mythology of Roberto Bolaño’s hard-knock life is starting to crumble: his widow says he was never a heroin addict, and others say he was not in Chile during the Pinochet coup.
• Slate takes a quick look around at the state of the book business.
• Russell Smith offers some reading recommendations.
• BookNet Canada asks: are e-readers’ claims to a greater greenness overstated?
• Stephenie Meyer still hasn’t gone back to that novel that got leaked; she’s now working on something else.

The most popular Quillblog posts of 2008

A look back at the most visited posts of 2008, with no comment or judgment (beyond a little shudder of despair over #1, which was nearly 10 times as popular as #2).

Next year on Quillblog: more penis references.

10. Sony Reader fails to wow them at WOTS

9. Photos from the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award

8. L.M. Montgomery’s sad end

7. Russell Smith takes on Stephenie Meyer

6. Rebecca Eckler and the cyber-bullies

5. Meyer dumps new Twilight installment

4. Canadian praise for the not-in-Canada Kindle

3. High school student expelled for short story

2. Small Press Book Fair spat gets ugly

1. U.S. publisher relents on eensy-weensy penis in German kids book

Take that, Stephenie Meyer!

It may not star the young wizard from Hogwarts, but J.K. Rowling’s latest book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, has become the fastest-selling title of 2008. According to Reuters (by way of the National Post):

Since it was released on December 4, The Tales of Beedle the Bard has also become the top selling book of 2008 on both sides of the Atlantic, topping the USA Today and Daily Telegraph charts and raising 4.2 million pounds ($6.5 million) for charity.

Proceeds from sales of the book, which has a global print run of eight million copies, will go to the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG), a charity for vulnerable children in Eastern Europe co-founded by Rowling.

The book does have a Potter connection, having been mentioned briefly in the series finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Rowling is now the world’s richest author, beating out Stephen King, Danielle Steel, and Conrad Black.

The search for the next J.K. Rowling

In The Independent, Nicholas Tucker writes that the search is on for a J.K Rowling for the new generation.

He says currently published children’s writers won’t hit the mark (not even Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series, which he says “is too deliberately skewed towards female readers to count as truly universal bestsellers in the way the Harry Potter stories were”), since they have already established themselves in a niche within the kids’ books genre, and says that someone new will have to fulfill the changing demands of kid lit in a way that is almost universally appealing to readers.

In her time Enid Blyton managed this by inventing heroic child characters who always get everything right just when in real life the balance at home and school was moving from adult domination towards children gaining more power. Roald Dahl, another huge commercial success, pushed this tendency further forward into overt fantasy, adding an extra measure of mischievous subversion. Rowling herself continued in this vein – has there ever been a parental couple more worthy of disrespect than Harry’s foster parents Mr and Mrs Dursley? She also located her endlessly resourceful child hero in fantasy land. The chances are that the next best-selling children’s author will do the same thing.

The Twilight guide to battling teen pregnancy

The blog Whiskey Fire has directed us to a nutty column by someone named Dr. Miriam Grossman, who feels that Stephenie Myers’ Twilight series has a lot to say on the subject of teen sex in this era of licentiousness and vice.

Here’s the best part (emphasis added, but hardly needed):

When standards are lowered to these abysmal levels, teens get a green light for behavior they’ll regret. Instead, a girl should be encouraged to wait until her own Edward Cullen comes along, a man who has waited for her as she has for him; who will stay at her side, fight battles for her, and prove himself. “Your scent is a drug to me,” Edward tells Bella, while eyeing her neck with hunger. But he doesn’t give in. As Tanya pointed out, he fights the toughest battle – the struggle against himself – in order to keep her safe and whole. This is what our girls are dreaming about, and this is what they deserve.

Now that’s something you can sink your teeth into.

As Whiskey Fire notes: “It’s true – most young women are very much attracted to young men who think they smell nice but won’t really chomp out their aortas.”

Depressed economy not all bad news for publishers

The economic turmoil in global financial markets is making a lot of folks depressed (ha!), but it apparently hasn’t stopped one mega-publisher from handing out generous bonuses to staff. The same week that Houghton Mifflin announced it was temporarily suspending new manuscript acquisitions, Hachette Book Group revealed its holiday munificence. As Motoko Rich writes in The New York Times:

As first reported by Publishers Lunch, an industry newsletter, Hachette is giving bonuses equal to one week’s salary to every employee in the company, in addition to the regular bonuses for which staff members are eligible.

Hachette, which recently opened a Canadian office, can afford to throw a little money around. Its Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing units publish superstar authors James Patterson, David Baldacci, and Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series has begun to outsell even J.K. Rowling.

Houghton Mifflin, on the other hand, publishes writers like Philip Roth and Günter Grass. It can claim literary superiority, but clearly doesn’t have the same clout at the cash register. In times of economic hardship, teen vampires are a better draw than Pulitzer Prize-winners.

Meyer beats Rowling?

The Canadian Press is reporting that Canadian sales of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series have begun to outstrip Harry Potter. The news comes via Indigo, which reported this week that sales of the Twilight series have surpassed 600,000 copies in 2008.

According to CP:

The paranormal romance of Bella, Edward the vampire, and Jacob the werewolf has become so popular among young readers this year that the Twilight Saga has eclipsed the number of Harry Potter books sold at the Canadian bookstore in 2007, including the launch of the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This sales milestone comes in the same week as the highly anticipated Twilight movie hits the big screen.

“I never expected to see another series sell as many copies as Harry Potter did in 2007. For the Twilight series to have sold more copies in 2008 than the Harry Potter series did last year is truly extraordinary,” says Trevor Dayton, Vice President, Kids and Entertainment at Indigo Books & Music Inc.