THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SHATZKIN

Published books are second-guess books.  I mean the writer does the best he or she can to achieve a book, and then the second-guess about its quality and goals comes from an editorial committee that knows nothing and cares less about the interests of the writer.  Their purpose is to make money and burnish the reputation of the publisher, but also to keep everyone employed and the institution functioning.

Therefore, publishers are opposed to risk.  Their idea of safety is sort of like someone walking through a field of land-mines: they are careful not to put their feet on untrodden land where no one has already taken the risk of setting off an explosion, usually because of fear of content: someone saying something that’s offensive or that should otherwise be suppressed, like the directions for making a dirty bomb.

I resist any kind of curating or editing because I do not want to be in the position of Raymond Carver or Thomas Wolfe, who are considered great BUT only because of the second guessing of editors who changed the writing, presumably for the better.

Once the issue of content is settled (which can be dismaying and limiting for writers, often destroying talent and censoring what can be written), there is another issue that has reared its head out of the swamp.  Because traditional books are objects for commerce, they are regulated at the points of production, transport, and sales, mediated by agents and salesmen in bookstores.  Copyright is a good example of legal mediation of print book content, which is regulated in large part by interstate commerce law and treaties between nations.  I was disconcerted in the Eighties when I went to preach in Canada, carrying along some denominational books, but they were impounded at the border because they were American.  The law is to protect Canadian writers from American domination.

My book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” is pirated online, evading the University of Calgary Press which is the publisher.  They say there’s little they can do about it.  We’re not TOO disconcerted because it only strips profit — money is a different, if derived, issue than intellectual rights.  Payment by a university press is covertly not about money but rather about credits toward tenure.  Since I’m not an academic, I get almost NO money.  Since the University needs its Press for credibility and to develop scholars, and therefore keeps the lights on and the receptionist paid, they aren’t too worried.  And I am writing books to get information out there that I want people to have, so I’m not too disturbed.  I just won’t do it again.

How much should government intervene in publishing?  The whole scenario has been changed by the creation of the internet.  If the government can’t enforce copyright because national boundaries are erased and bookstores are evaded, if they can’t control the writing or online publishing of anything, if the picture is too big now to censor on the grounds of decency (one man’s tentacle porn is another man’s seafood), and if there is no way to tell how many copies are being observed, downloaded or forwarded, the old pattern of print publishing is forever gone.  

Adept computer people tell us that everything that has ever been online or in a database CANNOT be permanently removed.  Someone somewhere (or a lot of them) have already downloaded and recorded it all in private locations.  I don’t use the Wayback Machine, but other people do.

The ability to monitor the flow of data across the entire world Internet amounts to continuous surveillance of individuals, something we have always blocked government from doing — in theory at least.  Phone tapping is one thing, tracking devices are another, and correspondence — even in-house memos — are still another.  In a time of terrorism and sabotage, the situation is far beyond anything we can even understand, much less control.  Hackers don’t worry about it.

A far more immediate government involvement is being litigated without many readers paying attention.  It is about price fixing.  Because of the many ways to sell print, it’s possible to undersell, to manipulate pricing.  It is rumored that when Amazon tells you the price for a book it factors in how much it thinks you want it by checking your buying history, your location, your level of education, and whatever else some techie thinks should be put into the algorithm.  Such an agreement breaks free trade laws.  I was disconcerted all over again when the price of a book I wanted — nothing special — was listed as costing hundreds of dollars.  A few days later on the library computer, it was bargain basement.  But there is no way to bargain.

It is illegal for the government to access records of what books you checked out from the library, but not the records of what you bought online.  Of course, probably it’s easy to hack local library records.  Library books are often acquired at contract prices that are lower than general prices, because the numbers are great enough to guarantee profit.

There are so few major publishers that if they agree that books should be priced at a certain level, they can make it stick.  If the book is a material object, some of the price has to be the cost of production: paper, printing machine, storage, distribution, promotion.  Since copies sold are the main way the public tries to understand quality, artificially inflating the price can act to impress the public that it is an increase in quality of content.  The New York Times Best Seller list does that.  Since more people mean more copies, more sales, more profit, more reputation, urban venues dominate and stigmatize regional books.

Random House Building

One of the accusations concerns the pricing of ebooks on Amazon.  The smoking gun is an email (!) proposing punishment for Random House because they didn’t agree to the proposal among the major publishing houses to control the price of ebooks.  Pricing ebooks is tricky since they are “virtual”: they have no manufacturing or storage costs, and content is not localized physically, so no transportation.  Content becomes more important because everything else is gone.  But computer techies don’t do content.

One of the most crucial and lucrative ways to profit from print now is databases, esp. personal addresses used for marketing, either sales or research.  This is a secondary profit from doing business online.  Most people seem oblivious to this, which means that Facebook is making zillions by accumulating and selling marketing data.  This is particularly true of books being sold from used book sources or books focused on specific categories of readers, whether they are children’s picture books or porn. 

Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin is from a book sales family and maintains “The Shatzkin Files” which constantly monitors and analyzes changes in book sales.  Like so many other forms of commerce, esp. in the arts, there has been major uproar which he claims is finally settling down.  From 2010 to the present he has organized the Digital Book World Conference, meant to analyze and get out ahead of change.  Now he has stopped doing that because he feels we are either entering a time of consolidation that will be fairly stable or there may be some change coming that is so unexpected no one can predict what will happen.  

It might be on the scale of a collapse of civilization as we know it.  I don’t think Shatzkin would be surprised and neither would I.  The Internet is completely dependent on power supply and delivery networks that are as virtual as any other coding.  It takes battalions of techies to keep the systems from corroding over time.  Monopolies and abuse by platform companies are as easily developed as international espionage and interference.  They interact.

This post comes from reflection on two main sources:

http://www.storygrid.com/power-to-the-people/

and 

http://www.idealog.com/blog/big-change-era-trade-book-publishing-ended-four-years-ago/

U of Calgary Press

As a bit of added interest, the U of Calgary Press recently issued me a check for my royalties due.  It was for $29.97 in Canadian funds.  I’m on the US side.  My bank called a few hours ago.  They charge $30 to process international funds.  What should they do about the three cents??  I was laughing too hard to think about it.

EBOOKS: WHAT'S TO LIKE?

It took me a while to realize that readers of ebooks think they are about the device or the formatting software.  In fact, they are about the infrastructure.  Two kinds of manuscripts exist: one is down-loaded to the reader’s hard drive on whatever gizmo in whatever format, and the other remains in the “cloud” of information.  The “cloud” is only a metaphor for huge databanks -- and I mean on the dimension of Bonneville Dam power plants -- where everything ever sent on the Internet is stored “forever,” whatever that means in a world where those places are vulnerable which is why their locations are kept secret.  They are not the “cloud.”  They are the “matrix.”  They generate the “cloud.”  If the sun sends out a really powerful electromagnetic burst, it could possibly take out the satellite links among these places plus the places themselves.  Electronics are tiny delicate IO tracings in electromagnetic form.

The ebook that is actually still safely in the cloud can be interrupted by the canceling of the link between the book file and the reader.  This could happen for physical reasons (both my internet and telephone were off-line for an hour yesterday evening) or for legal reasons (the book publisher is being sued or the contract with the author is re-negotiated or censorship laws have been imposed or you only had permission to read the book for a certain period of time).  It could happen for political reasons.  Anything that shuts down the internet, which is only links and not normally controlled by individuals.  If you live in the hinterlands, you know that support for fancy gizmos is not always dependable.  (Can you hear me now?)  Mostly they are meant for urban people.

Readers have still not really figured out how to “consume” ebooks.  In the first place, they are often in the habit of cruising bookstores or libraries to discover what they want to read, but they don’t know how to “cruise” ebooks.  They often went by the covers or blurbs, but those are missing.  It is an entirely unwarranted assumption that all people have computer gizmos or want them, much less to read print on them or fish around looking for book reviews.  

But ebooks are great for people who read three or more “immersive” novels a week, never buy the books but only borrow them from the library, and know about them because they hear from friends.  They are the modern equivalent of the original little paperbacks that fit into pockets and could be discarded or given away once they were read, because they only cost fifty cents or a dollar.  Ebooks are not so good for people who would have to print out the file in order to use them the way they want to: for study, for rereading, for keeping.

An ebook is a challenge to the author to be media-inclusive.  Video?  Sound?  Links?  Persons who are good at those modes (photography, composing) might not be the most powerful writers so might want a partner.  At present many authors or formatters simply grab images or music from other sources and introduce them to manuscripts.

Format has not settled down.  There is no universal format.  Each format serves books that can only be seen on its related gizmos and there are wars between publishers over who gets access to which books.  Format is crucial when print meaning is often managed by line-breaks (poetry) or spacing (episodes).  On paper the way a book looks has been determined by the paper’s dimensions and the printer’s capacities, but now it is not.  Beyond consideration of fonts and margins is the possibility of making the words writhe like snakes or blink or change color. Do you really want your book to tell all your friends what you are reading and what page you are on?  There are “books” now that can detect where your eyes are looking and supply sound track.  Do you want a book that reads you while you read it?

Here’s a crass one:  what about batteries?  The constant consciousness of their state, the need to dispose of them ecologically, and -- indeed -- the impact of mining the rare materials -- are a lot to think about.  And then there’s the need to keep track of the gizmo at all times, not to drop it, not to put it on a cushy surface that will suffocate it, not to leave it behind or allow the dog to chew on it.  (Some of this is true of paper books, too, but people are not so inclined to steal a simple cheap book.  They WILL steal an ebook file.)

The most amazing change has been the enormously diminished cost of publishing.  I am “publishing” this blog right now at no cost but electricity, my Internet access, and I suppose, the depreciation of my computer.  What this has done is to dump out the need for venture capitalism, which was the role of the publisher and also his/her/its leverage.  But what I’m doing here is not really publishing in a complete sense.  It is only public printing, not much different from having a printing press and then posting what I’ve printed on walls or poles.  

Publishing includes curation (deciding what is worthy), research, editing, formatting, illustrating, publicizing and distribution.  Google is doing much of this for me by providing a template for this blog, posting my writing in an accessible way, and even listing it on Google, which is a sort of combined distribution/advertising.  I could do most of this for a book myself through a service like lulu.com, which will create a file of my manuscript and store it, then print copies on demand.  “Doing it yourself” puts the writer in direct contact with the reader (disintermediation) IF the reader can find the writer.  If the latter is already “famous” and followed by the media, this will not be a problem.  If the writer is unknown and the reader doesn’t have the skills or motivation to find the writer, it’s the same as not being printed or published, either one.  So now the crucial issue is “discovery” -- how the writer and reader can find each other.  Write that software program and you’ll have enough money to write for the rest of your life.

What has happened (take a look at Lulu.com) is a shattering of what was publishing houses into “services” who will contract to format, proof, distribute, promote.  The difference is that the writer must manage them, hound them to meet deadlines, pay them.  So why not also hire an agent to do that for you?

The other solution has been a different kind of shattering:  a million little publishers, each small entity specializing in region, subject, or kind of writing.  Poets have been doing this all along with chapbooks, which value beautiful printing -- not many copies.  No money in it until years later when collectors may take notice.  Poets love find printing, but they might also have enough sense of adventure to publish cross-media.

What is needed (besides the software) is the romanticization and honoring of the people who can be in the middle in a constructive way, not by buying their way with venture capital but by putting their hearts and minds into the effort.  A conductor for the orchestra that produces the symphony.  (That’s the book, in case you’re not following the metaphor.)  When we esteem a writer’s support person -- whatever name we give him or her -- then maybe some of the people who want to be writers but aren't that great at it will turn their attention to the support of fine authors without feeling as though they're failing or compromising.  The way editors used to do.

SORTING BOOK RUBBLE

Sorting the rubble of the electronic book revolution is a daunting task because it’s clear now that there are a lot of small but crucial aspects that we have to rethink.  Like, how does a library check out ebooks?   Some mechanical way, like on a thumb or DVD?  Or does one simply download from the library’s hard drive by using a password.  Shock waves are now traveling the library world because some publishers are selling access to the library to “loan” ebooks to their customers, but limiting the number of viewings per book.  After two dozen “borrowers,” the access is canceled.  What if the publisher goes broke in the meantime and no longer maintains its hard drive?   A big part of some authors’ income is contracts with publishers to supply the kinds of books that libraries like, including big-print books, on a near-automatic basis.  What happens to big-print books when ebooks can adjust the size of the font?  

What the used book and remainders market discovered was the “long tail,” which means that there will be a few people who are interested in material long after it’s created, whether or not it’s popular in the moment.  I watched a Charlie Rose vid last night on which Charlie remarked that he was amazed how much viewership there was for his old program vids.  Of course, if people are watching his videos, they are leaving behind their internet addresses and creating marketable lists of “the kind of people who watch Charlie Rose.”  I’m getting offers for lists of what the computer thinks might be my customers.  (Pretty coarse-grained at present, but possibly valuable in the future.  Since it's cheap to send emails, one only needs a small proportion of responses.)  

It looks pretty clear that most of the intermediaries (agents, editors, publicists) between authors and readers are going to be evaporated by electronic publishing.  This makes everything cheaper, but also disperses it among a variety of modes: electronic readers, print-on-demand, audible, mixed media (inclusion of music and video) to the extent that most authors will want to hire a new kind of intermediary who can keep track of all this stuff as it develops.  A book keeper sort of person.

In recent years publishers have required authors to do as much personal selling of themselves as is decent.  They call it “platform.”  Or “branding.” This, of course, used to apply to the publisher.  If it doesn’t, who needs ‘em?  As publishers have dropped their identities in order to keep up with sales, they’ve gone to a “whaddya want?” mode and asked for surveys of what is successful or maybe advice from their sales reps, what's left of them.  “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog” is an old answer.  Today?  I’m afraid to guess.  “The Sexy Teenaged Robot Vampire?”  It won’t be “literary” in the traditional sense.

Another “sign of the times” is that though I’m small potatoes I’m getting mail from publicity companies wanting to sell me contracts for promotion.  What could a guy in New York City who knows nothing about Western art or bronzes do to promote “Bronze Inside and Out?”  The more specialized the material, the less helpful publicists are unless they inhabit the specialty and most of them don’t.  They’re just in line for author money.  If the authors are doing the "branding," then they have the mailing lists.  And who’s responsible for maintaining author websites?  Many of the ones I visit are outdated and dormant.

I think I’ve already talked about how “peer-reviewed journals” have crashed.  First, because they are too slow when times are moving the way they are now; second, because the previously defined “peers” of defined traditional disciplines are often dinosaurs by now; and, third,  it’s easier to just blog and let the comments roll. Fourth, because when things get into specialties, regions, sub-categories, suddenly there is a small enough group to see who the peer-reviewers are and realize new thinkers are in competition with them -- NOT collaboration in the interest of something objective.

Electronic books seem to be slowing down the trend to “Espresso” instant one-copy print-on-demand, but not printing services online like Lulu, particularly when bulk orders are wanted (for a classroom, or to take on the road and hand sell).  Both the POD printers and eBooks are opening up a great flood of new subjects, new writers, material once below the horizon of ordinary publishers.  Prestige is going up as the original class of vanity writers fall away, but also because the vanity presses are competing with so much free or low-cost service that don't need traditional presses or bindings.  How can they charge someone a LOT of money for a thousand copies of a story that interests only the author’s family -- destined for basement storage -- when the story can be put online at Lulu.com and only printed when someone really wants a copy?  The copies are quite nice.

Or why not just blog the same material?  It’s simply a matter of being indexed on Google instead of Amazon.  There are companies that will make blogs into printed books if someone wants them.  It’s easy enough to download and bind.  Blogging is “publishing” in the sense of making the material available to the general reading public.  It is NOT publishing in the sense of having a book entrepreneur (publisher) investing money in your text in order to print as many copies as they think they can sell.

I noticed when I went to add a post to my blog www.scriverart.blogspot.com it had not had any of the upgrades that www.prairiemary.blogspot.com has enjoyed.  I’m sure this is because my readership for Prairie Mary is over a thousand hits a week and because I post a thousand words every single day.  I haven’t used any of the gimmicks: twitter, Facebook, et al, except that I do repost to enewp.com  when I think the subject is of interest to a national audience.  I have not figured out the global audience.  One day my Blogger stats “hit map” shows Argentina, then it drops Argentina in favor of China.  But Clustrmaps (on my website) shows no readers in China, no one in Madagascar and someone mysteriously floating in the China Sea.  And someone is evidently reading my blog daily to find a "hook" to put on my highest Google entry.

I’m getting email from people who want to post to my blog and then link it to their own.  Often they're selling something.  They’re reacting to advice from people who know how to sell “stuff.”  I do not write “stuff.”  I write the highest quality content I can manage, though I choose topics that might not interest everyone or even appeal to the same people from one day to the next.  I’m convinced that in the end what counts is CONTENT.  That’s always what has counted.  Except that the guide to content used to be tied to the publisher, a business that could deteriorate or simply evaporate.  Now the content is tied to the author.  The new problem is match-making between authors and readers -- directly.  The question is whether one intermediary can serve both authors and readers, which is the “inter” part.  More questions than answers.

HEAD-SMASHED-IN BUFFALO JUMP

Yesterday there was a good deal of messaging that was prompted by an article in The New York Review of Books, “Google and the Future of Books” by Robert Darnton. Vol 56, #2, February 12, 2009, in case anyone is looking for this on paper. The article is about the resolution of the lawsuit against Google’s plan to digitize all books, which was resolved in Google’s favor, kicking up fears of monopoly. The article takes a long historical view, tracing the impact of technology and the birth of the whole concept of copyright. Google is digitizing books without copyrights, books with expired copyrights that are out of print, books with copyrights that are “orphaned” (the publishing company has dispersed, the author can’t be located), and everything else they can get hold of. The question is how to manage all that stuff. (I do worry a bit about sunflares or the reversing of the planet’s polarity wiping out all the virtual books. But those catastrophes wouldn’t do ordinary books much good either.)

A respondent suggests that the real news is that ebooks are now profitable enough for anyone to care. And that other entities besides Google are puttin’ out the books on the Internet.

Athabasca University Press, is a “virtual” university far to the north in the province of Alberta where developing oil sands means there are a lot of vigorous people who have liberal gaps in their arduous work lives which they choose to fill indoors taking online courses. The director, Walter Hildebrandt, was the director of the University of Calgary Press when they accepted my book, “Bronze Inside and Out.” (It is partly available online through Google Books. I didn’t give permission nor did the press.)

Athabasca U Press is scouting a new trail by making their books available online for free, as well as the journals they publish. One CAN get the books bound conventionally, Print On Demand. I tested this service by downloading “Imagining ‘Head-Smashed-In’” by Jack W. Brink, one of the intrepid archeologists and paleontologists who have made Alberta one of the most exciting places to regard the deep past.

“Head-Smashed-In” is the name of a buffalo jump, a place where for millennia native peoples have chased the animals over a cliff in order to kill them for meat. One of the first things I learned was that it was the buffs who were supposed to get their heads smashed in, rather than the people, though some unfortunates did get caught up in the melee. Also, I had not known this had been the name of the place for a very, very long time -- in Blackfeet, of course.

A rather fabulous museum exists next to the site -- not ON it, since that would destroy what remains of the site. If you are going to southern Alberta this summer, mark on your map both Head-Smashed-In near Fort Macleod and the Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller, which addresses the much, much earlier dinosaur era and the slightly overlapping megamammal period of the mastodons. I know people who consider these “religious” institutions because one comes away infused with wonder at the clear evidence of nearly inconceivable events.

I just read “Imagining Head-Smashed-In” online. It is full of gorgeous photos of the land plus illuminating paintings of how things must have been -- FAR more complex and skillful than the usual conceptions of bison pouring lemming-like over a cliff. It turns out that this specific piskun (Blackfeet for buffalo jump) is archetypal, an example of how the actual cliff is only part of the operating terrain which includes a wide grassy basin above the cliff that stretches for kilometres, the abrupt sandstone break which leaks high quality spring water at the bottom, and then another smaller area suitable for the work of cutting up the carcasses, rendering fat, roasting meat in pit-ovens, cutting and drying muscle meat, cracking open leg bones for marrow. The final elegance is not far away: the river valley of the Old Man River, excellent for winter camping and stashing the preserved airtight packets of meat in rawhide while working on the hides of the animals.

This efficient and arduous work demanded cooperation among a hundred or more people until the arrival of horses made it unnecessary and then the elimination of the buffalo herds made it impossible. (See a parallel with printing?) To properly understand the remnants that they found, Brink and his crew replicated as much as they could. Buffalo chips (dung) DOES burn as well as wood, but only if there is a stiff breeze. Buffalo bones burn rather well, so long as they are greasy. Since the grease is nutritionally valuable, the bones were smashed and boiled in rawhide-lined pits heated with hot rocks, then the fat skimmed off. (One of the most outstanding tribal families today is named “Grease-Melters.”)

The crew figured out why the boiling pits contained one kind of stone and the roasting pits contained another: quartzite holds heat better for boiling while flat plates of sandstone are better for roasting pits. This is the sort of detail that can make historical novels come alive. They also discovered that smashing bones is a lot harder than one might think, not least because one’s face and clothes become spattered with marrow and grease.

The Head-Smashed-In museum is built as steps down a cliff face. Brink chuckles over today’s visitors to the museum assuming that inside they are looking at the actual rock of the piskun, because the reality is that it’s a huge casting created by spraying latex onto a real cliff to create a giganto mold. At the bottom of the cliff is another giga-casting of a partly excavated dig with real equipment scattered around it. To me this is MORE amazing than including an actual rock outcropping in a building.

Even more remarkable is Brink’s gradual realization that the local tribal population should be included, that much information remained among them (the last “jump” was about one hundred and fifty years ago), that there were political issues to resolve between and within the tribes, and that much could be resolved by good humor and participation.

Everyone with access to a computer can read this book. It is this last quality of being inclusive and generous that makes such a specialized subject valuable for everyone as an example, even if they don’t care whether they ever walk the line markers that show where the bison hazers should be or ever boil a bison bone. The story combines the determined strength of early nomads with the careful sifting and reflection of modern scientists in a fabulous tale. Don’t stop before the last lyrical “imaginings” of archeologist and arrow-user.

Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains by Jack W. Brink who “is Archaeology Curator at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, Canada. He received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. from the University of Alberta.”

Hardcover: 978-1-897425-00-8 (HC) $85.00
Paperback: 978-1-897425-04-6 (SC) $35.95
E-Book: 978-1-897425-09-1 (e-book) No cost.