The e-books saga continues

I don’t own an iPhone but I do own a Touch, which is exactly like the iPhone without the phone. Which means that I can, for free, download the application that Amazon uses on its Kindle 2 “Wireless Reading Device.” In other words, I’ve had a smaller version of the Kindle in my pocket all this time, and I just didn’t know it.

To be honest, though, I do have some book material on my Touch already. I have an application called Stanza, for which I acquired some classics (they have a lot of free public domain books available). The one I actually tried to read was Leaves of Grass because for some reason looking at poetry seemed more likely than attempting to read a novel. And I will admit that Walt Whitman is one of those mountains I have never climbed, despite being an English major and a pretty inveterate reader.

The verdict? It’s hard to say. I’ve tried it a number of times, and made some progress, but I haven’t gotten very far. The question is, is it because I just don’t care much for Leaves of Grass—I’ve tried to read it in the past, on paper, and I’ve always failed there too—or I haven’t enjoyed the Touch reading experience? It is 2 inches by 3 inches, after all. That’s smaller than a basic paperback book. A lot smaller.

I have some weighty tomes in addition to the Whitman. For instance, for reasons that elude me now I also downloaded Plato’s Republic at some point. There’s a page-turner to keep you reading into the wee hours. What I need to do is find a regular book and give that a shot. Maybe Dickens for instance (I love Dickens). If something guaranteed to satisfy doesn’t satisfy, then the problem probably is the medium and not the message.

I’ll let you know.

See the video, read the book.

We've just published a new volume, and I was thinking that I'd been remiss in posting to the blog lately, so I thought, well, maybe I could have someone else do the job for me. How about a made-for-the-web video promoting Michael Connelly's The Brass Verdict? Sounds good to me!

Ebooks yet again

Like everyone else with an internet connection, I’ve been gazing at the Kindle 2, and I have to admit, for the first time I’m actually beginning to think nice thoughts. Kindle 1 was okay—I did get my hands on one for a while—and this improves on some of my complaints (especially page-change speed). I could really see getting one of these machines if it didn’t cost the proverbial arm and a leg. I’m also beginning to get intrigued about how this thing can play into what we do here at Select Editions, given that we are, after all, in traditional publishing. Is our kind of publishing going the way of the buggy whip? An article I read this morning compared ebooks to talkies, and publishers to silent film producers. Maybe, but if I’m not mistaken, the cost of talkies, for patrons, was the same as the cost of silents. As long as there’s the heavy initial hardware buy-in, I can’t see ebooks jumping past early adapters and techies. Maybe it boils down to whoever makes the $50 ebook reader is the ultimate winner. I don’t know. I have nothing against the concept per se, but at the moment, I do have something against paying all that money for it. I’m not betting against it, though. I’m hedging. I think I’ll sit on my chips for awhile before making any commitment. In the meanwhile, good-old-fashioned books on paper, despite all the economic turmoil in the publishing business (and everywhere else) still look like a reasonable bet, at least for the short term.

In search of editors

In 2008, I read today, nearly 480,000 books were published in the USA.

480,000? No wonder the publishing industry is in a bad state. There cannot possibly be 480,000 books worth publishing, maybe ever, much less annually. My understanding is that 10% of these, about 50,000 or so, are novels. 50,000 works of fiction a year.

The mind boggles.

I have spent my entire adult career in publishing. The first thing I learned, long before I came to Select Editions, was that most books aren’t very good, and that part of my job was to weed out the bad ones and to publish only the good ones. The second thing I learned was that quality was no guarantee of quantity: just because a book was good didn’t mean it was going to sell. Which translated into the truth that publishing can be a very frustrating business, for writers and publishers and booksellers alike, even when all you’re talking about is good books.

So now publishers are suffering in the weak economy, but if you ask me, they are merely paying the price of publishing way more books than deserve to be published. Unfortunately, nowadays anyone can self-publish a book, good or bad, and promote it on the internet, and maybe sell a lot of copies. So while traditional publishing might dwindle, probably the number of books will not lessen, but could even increase. One thing traditional publishing was supposed to do, but probably wasn’t doing all that well given the number of books being published, was to separate the good from the bad. Take away that gate-keeping aspect of publishing, and I’m not quite sure how you’ll be able to tell the good from the bad anymore. But of course, 480,000 books a year meant that publishing has long ago abdicated its role as gatekeeper. That’s not publishing, that’s printing. And that’s a different business altogether.

Gatekeepers are not perfect, of course. No one is the absolute judge of good and bad, the perfect arbiter of what someone else will enjoy. But skilled editors, trained to work with writers and to identify good writing, and with good instincts of their own, do serve some purpose. After all, reading a book is a pretty big commitment, not of money (books remain a relatively inexpensive entertainment) but of time. How long does it take to read the average book. Four hours straight? Eight hours? A week, a little bit every day? That’s a lot of time, a lot of investment. So that investment better pay off. Part of that small initial money investment was for someone to have worked on your behalf so that your time investment will be worth it. Mostly that’s the writer, of course, but editors need to fit in there too. Not all writers are worth reading: there’s that 480,000 books a year again. Editors help the rest of us find the good books. Reviewers (fewer and fewer all the time, at least in traditional media) do likewise. And word of mouth. But the editors come first. They’re the ones who find a manuscript and say, Let’s publish this. And they haven’t been doing their job as well as they should. As a result, their business is going through a dark transition, and no one knows how things will end up.

Maybe we’ll all be saved by the internet and peer reviews and a system of new gatekeepers. It could happen. Netflix is a good example of how it’s happened successfully with movies. But let’s face it. There’s only a few hundred new movies a year. All the available cinematographic technology doesn’t really place the ability to make a movie into everyone’s hands, whereas today’s available writing technology potentially makes each and every one of us a publisher of our own work. And roughly half a million of us, in the USA alone, are already pumping out a book a year. As I said, the mind boggles.

We are in for tough times on the reading front. I don’t know what’s going to happen. One thing I can guess though is that it will be harder and harder to find new authors worth reading in the forest of all that will be coming out. Let’s hope that we can find some way to keep separate the good from the bad. I don’t know about you, but when I commit to spending a week reading a book, I want it to be a good one.

The latest volume is in the mail

What better way to introduce our deep-in-winter volume than with author Sophie Kinsella discussing Remember Me? and the upcoming Shopaholic movie?

A visit with author Patrick Taylor

We love Patrick Taylor, and this video shows why. We've just published his second book, An Irish Country Village, in Select Editions volume 300.

Never-ending stories

I just read a book I didn’t like. Normally I wouldn’t bother mentioning this, since it happens more often than not, but this was an unusual case. The thing is, it was a good book. It was well-written, with an interesting plot and a great setting. Our first reader had even recommended it for inclusion in a future Select Editions volume. But as far as I was concerned it had one big insurmountable problem.

It didn’t end.

There were some really important plot elements in the book revolving around whether or not the heroine would get romantically involved with the guy who was obviously right for her, and also what exactly was the story behind the heroine’s mother’s mysterious disappearance. There were other plot elements too, and they were all resolved, but when you turned the last page of the manuscript, the heroine still hadn’t gotten together with Mr. Right, and we still knew nothing about what had happened to the mother. The resolution of these issues, apparently, might be in the next book in the series. Or maybe not. The publisher, in any case, is promising a long series revolving around this heroine.

Now, I’m not necessarily against long books or connected books. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, for instance, which is a trilogy, where nothing is resolved until you get to the end of volume three. I understand this, and I am on-board with it. And I have enjoyed series books where the same characters come back to entertain us more than once, so I am on-board with series novels in general, provided each installment stands on its own. What I am not on-board with is mysteries that don’t solve their mystery, or romances that don’t get romantic. To fully appreciate the book that started this discussion, I would have to read not only that book but, at the very least, the next book in the series, and maybe even beyond that. This isn’t finding a book you like or an author you like and reading as it suits you. It’s finding a book or an author you like and being forced to read as it suits the author or the publisher. I think that’s asking an awful lot of a reader. It’s practically a lifetime commitment. And I think it’s also a little bit of a cheat.

I’ve talked about series novels in the past that are problematic, especially those that demand that you already know everything there is to know about the characters before you read the latest installment, which means that you have to start at the beginning of the series or you’re totally confused. Good authors who write about series characters—for instance, Michael Connelly or Lee Child, to name just two—don’t do this. They provide you with everything you need to know about the book you are reading within that book. Sure, if you’re a fan and know some of the previous books, you might get a little more out of it, but if you start reading any one of their books, you are never lost for a second. That’s because they’re the good ones. And the idea of letting the absolutely major plot elements hang until some other future book? I doubt if it would ever cross their minds.

I guess publishers nowadays are hoping to build repeat authors that readers will want to revisit when the next book comes out. I can understand that. But I wish they wouldn’t limit their audiences when they do it. I love repeat authors, but I love repeat authors whose each and every book is satisfying on its own. If I want a soap opera that never ends, I’ll watch a soap opera on television. When I read a book I want a beginning, a middle and an end. Call me a conservative. Call me old-fashioned. But when I turn that last page, I want to feel nourished. Sure, I might get hungry again later, but I don’t want to end a meal still hungry. That simply does not do the job for me.