Your e-book speculation for the day

It’s a shame Canadians still can’t experience the apparent bliss that is Amazon’s Kindle 2 (despite the release of that iPhone app that would doubtless work perfectly well on Canadian models), but that hasn’t stemmed our interest in all the commentary on e-book readers, like that which came out of a recent publisher’s conference in Britain.

Meanwhile, American author Steven Johnson’s piece from The Wall Street Journal is perhaps the first article this Quillblogger has read that makes an e-book reader sound like something worth owning:

A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I’d bought and downloaded Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty. By the time the check arrived, I’d finished the first chapter.

This has obvious benefits for publishers, says Johnson:

Amazon’s early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it’s not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you’re at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and — voilà! — you own it.

Bookmarks: historical vampires, Nabokov’s last work, and forgotten Pulitzers

Sundry links from around the Web:

• The New York Times looks at established authors who write well into old age.
• The co-author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies announces his next book: Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter.
• The Wall Street Journal shines a light on the battle against the Comic Sans Serif font. Oddly, while the article provides excellent examples of the detractors’ ire, it doesn’t really establish why they hate the font so much. (Besides, we all know that if it weren’t for Comic, Ransom would take over.)
• Coming soon from Random House: the e-book equivalent of DVD special features.
• Vladimir Nabokov’s final book to be published in November.
• Proving the seven-figure book deal isn’t dead – in Asia, at least – a debut novelist receives a sizable advance from Penguin India.
• The top-ten forgotten Pulitzer-prize winners.

Laura Bush signs memoir deal

According to The Wall Street Journal, outgoing U.S. First Lady Laura Bush has just signed a deal with Scribner for a memoir of her time in the White House, which should hit the streets sometime in 2010.

Publishing executives estimated the price for Mrs. Bush’s memoir at $3.5-million to $5-million. During a strong economy, Sen. Hillary Clinton received an $8-million advance for her 2003 White House memoir, Living History, which was published by Simon & Schuster. That book … was a hit, earning back its advance after only one week.

Memoirs by First Ladies are a dime a dozen, but this one has the potential to be a bit more interesting than most. Before Laura met George, she was generally known as a left-leaning type, and throughout her husband’s time in office she mostly kept her thoughts and feelings to herself. Who knows, maybe she’ll reveal that she was a mole for the ACLU all along.

An uncertain holiday season for the book industry

The holiday season is upon us, with Christmas six weeks (count ‘em, folks) away, and Motoko Rich writes in The New York Times that U.S. booksellers and publishers are bracing for a difficult quarter:

Leonard S. Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, said in an internal memorandum predicting a dreadful holiday shopping season, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, that “never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in.”

Last week HarperCollins, the books division of the News Corporation, reported that fiscal first-quarter operating income had slid to $3 million from $36 million a year earlier, despite its publication of the Oprah Winfrey-anointed novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

Rich mentions tactics booksellers are using to encourage sales, and looks at an independent bookstore that is instituting a priority seating policy at book readings to customers who purchased the book. And though the retail season is looking soft, it’s apparently not getting in the way of big book deals.

Although some might be cautious about signing a debut novelist, most publishers said they were still aggressively pursuing deals for celebrity books and others with natural best-seller prospects. Last month Little, Brown & Company signed a deal with the comedian Tina Fey for a sum reported as more than $5 million, and Jerry Seinfeld was out with a book proposal this week that some publishers suggested could go for a high seven-figure advance.

One possible silver lining, Rich says, is that since books aren’t selling as well as they would in a better economy, it doesn’t take as many sales to call a book a “bestseller” — a tip to resumé-padding B-listers everywhere.

On the Canadian front, though, things could be very different — and not so dire — for publishers and booksellers. The Canadian Publishers’ Council says in a media release that “books are expected to be one of the most popular gift purchases of 2008,” and Deloitte’s Annual Holiday Survey predicts that holiday spending levels among Canadians will match or be slightly higher than last year, citing books third in a list of top 10 holiday gifts for 2008.

Bookmarks: election books, a civil war averted, and more

A few book links, not all of them even politics-related:

• Book publishers gear up for election-2008-inside-story sweepstakes (Wall Street Journal)
• Good thing Obama won – Erica Jong says there would have been “blood in the streets” otherwise (New York Observer – thanks to the back-in-business Moby Lives for the link)
• Miriam Toews’ new novel gets reviewed (none too kindly) in The New York Times
• The Tyee talks to Lee Henderson about Vancouver
• The strange life and strange new book of The Beans of Egypt, Maine author Carolyn Chute (The New York Times)

Random U.S. pulls novel about Mohammed’s wife

The Wall Street Journal tells a disturbing story: Random House in the U.S. has cancelled plans to publish a historical novel about the wife of the Islamic prophet Mohammed. Their fear? That Sherry Jones’s novel, The Jewel of Medina, could (in the publisher’s words) “incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.” (Strangely, though, this didn’t occur to them when they bought the book last year in a $100,000 two-book deal.) WSJ writer Asra Q. Nomani calls it early on: “The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.”

Even more disturbingly, Nomani shows that one American academic played a disproportionately large role in the fate of The Jewel of Medina. “In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin,” writes Nomani. Offended by the book, Spellman asked a colleague to “warn” Muslims on his website, and pushed Random House to withdraw the novel.

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a “very ugly, stupid piece of work.” The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: “the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life.” Says Ms. Spellberg: “I walked through a metal detector to see ‘Last Temptation of Christ,’” the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. “I don’t have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.”

Well, surely we can all rest a little easier knowing that Denise Spellberg is out there deciding what we should be allowed to read.

Amazon demands print-on-demand exclusivity

From The Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon’s Web site.

The move signals that Amazon is intent on using its position as the premier online bookseller to strengthen its presence in other phases of bookselling and manufacturing. Amazon is one of the biggest booksellers in the U.S., with a market share publishing experts estimate to be about 15%. Amazon doesn’t comment on sales.

The news appeared first on Writers Weekly, an e-zine for freelance writers. They have accumulated a huge number of links to stories about the move in the press and on the net and are providing daily updates.

Free as in beer and books

Now that the crisis over parity and pricing has eased somewhat – at least for the moment – we can again turn our attention to a more pressing issue in books: how can we get them for free?

The easiest way to get free books is to work in publishing (or at, say, a publishing industry magazine), but there are millions and millions of readers – or, at least, thousands and thousands – out there who are not so lucky, and who are thus still paying money for books. And so, for them, here is the latest in free book news:

• HarperCollins will post free books on the web (The New York Times)
• Tor to give away e-books (Slashdot)
• Not free, but close: Random House U.S. will sell books online, chapter by chapter (The Wall Street Journal)
• But don’t forget: free books are rarely free (CNN Money.com)

Bookmarks: a new Alice Munro story, a fake Robert Fisk biography of Saddam Hussein, and a complaint about pokey publishing

Some book-related links:

• “Free Radicals,” a new short story by Alice Munro (The New Yorker)
• Robert Fisk’s bio of Saddam Hussein is selling well – except he didn’t write it (The Independent)
• Why does it take so long to publish a book? (The New York Times)
• How the online archive of one student’s books became the behemoth that is LibraryThing.com (The Wall Street Journal)
• The trouble with translations (Times Online)
• Alberto Manguel on Dante’s Divine Comedy (The Globe and Mail)
• An interview with critic James Wood (Financial Times)

Whither Dan Brown?

It’s been five years now since Dan Brown’s insanely popular The Da Vinci Code was published, and a lot of publishing industry types are getting antsy waiting for the follow-up, which is purported to be about freemasonry and America’s founding fathers.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The whole industry is impatient. Book sales are generally sluggish, and one explosive, high-profile title can jump-start sales across the board as customers pour into the stores and walk out with a bagful of titles. [...] So where is the new novel? It’s a mystery worthy of the deepest secrets of the Knights Templar. Mr. Brown, holed up in New Hampshire, isn’t saying. His agent, Heide Lange, isn’t, either.

“When a major author doesn’t deliver, you get down on your knees and pray,” says Laurence Kirshbaum, a book agent who heads up LJK Literary Management in New York. “You can’t threaten, you can’t cajole, you wait.” Back in November 2004, a spokeswoman for Doubleday said the target publishing date for Mr. Brown’s next book was 2005, although she noted that “there are no guarantees.”

Now, the publisher is hinting that a manuscript is close. “Dan Brown has a very specific release date for the publication of his new book, and when the book is published, his readers will see why,” says Stephen Rubin, president of Bertelsmann’s Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, whose Doubleday imprint publishes Mr. Brown. Mr. Rubin declined further comment.

From there, the Wall Street Journal reporter ties himself in knots trying to guess what the “very specific release date” will be. Could it be July 4th, perhaps? Or Oct. 13th, when the cornerstone of the White House was laid in 1792? Or maybe it’ll be Sept. 18, the same day that president Washington led a Masonic parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to lay the cornerstone of the Capitol Building in 1793?

For our money, the more pressing question is: how is Doubleday going to sell the film rights to this one, considering that the film has already been made under the title National Treasure?