E-Reads 2.0 Launches Today 25 Mar 2010, 12:05 pm

Today is launch day for the our completely redesigned website and we're both incredibly excited and slightly apprehensive. As we said the other day, in addition to a brand new look and we've installed a robust new engine and a bunch of new features with lots more on the way.

But we know that when you re-engineer a website stuff happens, and we ask your indulgence as our butterfly emerges from its chrysalis. As webmaster Anthony Damasco explains, "We are repointing our domain to the new server, and that can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 48 hours." So you may experience some disruption, and when service is restored there will inevitably be things to patch and replace.

But when the wings dry it will definitely be a butterfly, and we wish our soft launch a gentle landing.

Richard Curtis

Michiko Kakutani Surveys the Cut and Paste Culture 25 Mar 2010, 8:48 am

In the three years that we've been blogging we've urged you to read books and articles that we thought interesting, but we've never presumed to order you to read something.

There's always a first time, and an article by Michiko Kakutani in the March 21, 2010 New York Times has inspired us to resort to the imperative case. Ms. Kakutani is the Pulitzer Prizewinning reviewer for the Times, a job she has performed with distinction for almost three decades, and in her penetrating essay Texts without Context she has captured our zeitgeist in a way that few other brief examinations of contemporary culture that we're aware of have done.

Our zeitgeist not a pretty sight. But if you want to understand who you are and where you fit into 21st century civilization, we herewith direct you to read and reflect on what Ms. Kakutani has to say.

Her ruminations take the form of an overview of books about the influence of the Web on art and entertainment. "These new books" she writes, "share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity."

We find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. Ms. Kakutani's essay is about the transformation of our culture from an immersive one (like losing yourself in a good book) to a cut-and-paste one. If we extract some gems to tempt you to read her article, doesn't that make us guilty of the very sin of cutting and pasting that is the essence of what's gone wrong in our culture? But if we don't paste some gems from her essay, can we trust you to thoroughly read her argument?

Okay, we trust you. Immerse yourself in Texts Without Context and have your report on our desk first thing in the morning.

Richard Curtis

New Look Coming to E-Reads 23 Mar 2010, 11:01 pm

This year E-Reads celebrates its 10th year in business, and we're treating ourselves to a makeover. Production manager and designer Nathan Fernald has given us a new look and webmaster Anthony Damasco has installed a powerful new engine, a bunch of new features and robust functionality. John Douglas and Pam Valvera worked tirelessly to clean up a database that looked like the place where damaged code goes to die.

And me? I kibbitzed until I was politely asked to find something else to do.

New features include...

• Wider page with three columns of content and graphics
• Vastly improved custom book and author search
• Sample chapters for every book
• Better Comments section
• Expanded Featured Books Display
• More detailed author pages
• Many more content purchase options
• Updated FAQ page
• A sliding promotional banner
  

On the way...

• A daily news feed reporting up to the minute industry trends and breaking developments
• Author pages will be linked to their home pages, Twitter and other social network sites
• Newsletter sign-up

We know that the new improved E-Reads website will serve customers and authors better as we forge ahead into our second decade.

Richard Curtis

Guest Blog: Steven R. Boyett Launches "Digital Writes" 22 Mar 2010, 11:45 pm

After Steven R. Boyett contributed yet another penetrating comment on an E-Reads posting, we invited him to guest-blog for us. Well, "invited" may not be the appropriate word. We threatened to hurt him if he refused. We felt his sparkling insights deserved a wider forum than our comments box. He accepted (of his own free will and volition, honest!) and today we are happy to offer The Schlock of the New, the first of what we hope will be many feuilletons in a column he calls Digital Writes. Which means that E-Reads is now in Digital Writes Management. :-(
RC
*******************************
DIGITAL WRITES
Steven R. Boyett

The Schlock of the New

Dear Sirs:
As a hansom cab driver of long standing I am writing to voice my objection to opening our public roadways to motor vehicle carriages for hire. Not only will this action devastate a grand tradition, it will take food from the mouths of children, notably my own. The inferior training and professionalism of these opportunistic motor carriage drivers represents a danger to the largely uninformed public, and their presence flies in the face of the people’s stated preference — indeed, their fond affection — for the hansom cab. The horses themselves are entitled to work for their living, as they have for generations stretching back to the Garden.
Yours most humbly,

*

Dear Sir or Madam:
I write with great dismay as the last member of a distinguished family of abacus-makers with a lineage older than writing itself. That a mass-produced device be available to any untrained person not possessed of a deep respect and affection for the God-given perfection of numbers is near to blasphemy. These “calculators” denote the end of an era, a noble industry, and indeed a way of life. As such they take money from trained professionals and disseminate ignorance by creating a generation of calculator-users who feel entitled to expect a device to perform a function while themselves possessing no mathematical ability whatsoever, much less appreciation for the marvelous intricacies upon which our Universe is constructed. Such a device can only be the herald of an Age of Ignorance, and those of us with a right to earn a living from our trade deplore it to our dying breath.
Respectfully,

*

Dear Editor:
As a DJ who has spent years learning the subtleties of manipulating vinyl records upon the wonder that is the modern turntable (specifically the Technics 1200 series) so that he can entertain dancers and partygoers who appreciate good music, I am writing to express my outrage at the spread of “microwave DJs” — amateurs who use computers to play music files at nightclubs and other events. These people are not DJs and never will be. They are button-pushers whose work is all done for them by a soulless machine, not craftsmen who have spent years developing a specialized set of skills. This is not merely a fad, it is a dangerous trend that takes money from the pockets of real DJs, who have been earning a living with turntables for decades and have a right to continue to do so. It is not hyperbole to state that children will go hungry because of these computers, and audiences will soon forget the days when the backbone of their nightlife was a professional spinning real records (much more affordable than a live band, I might add) instead of a computer geek with taped-up Buddy Holly glasses. It is the end of an era.
Sincerely,

*

Dear Mr. Boyett:
I’m afraid I must take exception to your naively utopian views on the advent of digital media as powerful democratizers of art by virtue of their relatively inexpensive production and virtually free distribution, reproduction, and reconfiguration. As a fiction writer who earns — I say earns — his living by writing the much-loved and hardly anachronistic objects known as printed books, I am seeing my rightful livelihood eradicated by those with no respect for professional skills, authorship, or indeed the printed book itself. I have worked for years to learn my trade and establish myself as a professional in an industry that stretches back for centuries, and these alleged “authors” who actually give away their (non)books for free are mere scabs who undermine this industry’s foundations. The more technology grants such abilities and access to the unprofessional, the more people will be coerced into believing themselves artists with a fundamental right to give away their work. And he who gives away his book makes it easier not to buy mine. He effectively takes food from my child’s mouth. He who quotes my work at length in his free blog may as well be siphoning gas from my car. He who shares my work breaks into my house and ransacks the drawers. He who incorporates it into his own work without permission or credit picks my pocket. He who steals my purse steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed. My novels — modern retellings of beloved fairy tales, available on Amazon in print and Kindle format, and in used bookstores as well — belong to no one but me.
Originally,

****************************
Steven R. Boyett was born in Atlanta, Georgia, grew up all over Florida, and attended the University of Tampa on a writing scholarship before quitting to write his first novel, Ariel, when he was nineteen. E-Reads publishes the e-book edition of Ariel.

Soon after Ariel was published he moved from Florida to Los Angeles, California, where he continued to write fiction and screenplays as well as teach college writing courses, seminars, and workshops. He has published stories in literary, science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies and magazines, as well as publishing articles and comic books. In the early Nineties his imprint Sneaker Press published chapbooks by the poets Carrie Etter and the late Nancy Lambert.

He has also been a martial arts instructor, professional paper marbler, advertising copywriter, proofreader, tyepsetter, writing teacher, and Website designer and editor.

In 2000 he took some time off from writing. He learned to play the didgeridoo and began composing and DJ-ing electronic music.

As a DJ he has played clubs, conventions, parties, Burning Man, and sporting events. He produces three of the world's most popular music podcasts: Podrunner, Podrunner: Intervals, and Groovelectric.

In 2009 Berkley Books reissued Ariel and published its stunning sequel Elegy Beach.
****************************
Photo by Ken Mitchroney

Looking for Tedium? E-Books Are Your Medium 22 Mar 2010, 12:05 am

In his wrap-up remarks at February's Tools of Change conference, host Tim O'Reilly urged attendees to focus on "the boring stuff" that needs to be done to realize their vision of the future of the e-book industry.

I found this statement puzzling. Despite the widespread impression that e-book people are the jet-setters of the publishing business, the truth is that just about every step in the creation and publication of e-books is excruciatingly boring. In fact, e-book publishing may be described as long stretches of stupefying tedium punctuated by moments of numbing monotony.

Let me take you through a book's conversion so you will understand what I mean. I urge you to have a strong cup of coffee to stay awake. Bear in mind that though this abstract will take but a minute for you to read, the actual operation requires dozens of man-hours per title. I say "man-hours" but "troll-hours" is more apposite, as the people who do it work in Stygian gloom, eat living things and snarl when poked with a stick. Our staff posed for this group photo. Left to right: Richard, team captain Anthony Damasco, Nathan, John, Pam and Liced. (Not in picture: Michael, who left our company for a less boring job.)

A brief explanation is in order. Most books published by E-Reads are previously published works that went out of print and reverted to the author. In order to reissue them we scan the original printed volumes rather than use text documents furnished by the author, because the former have been copy-edited.

Scanning. The first task in the production of an e-book is scanning. The book's cover and binding are stripped to facilitate the feeding of pages into the optical reader, and headers and page numbers sliced off to reduce garbage in the scanned document. Even if high-speed scanners are used the process must be overseen by a human. Monitoring a scanner has the allure of watching someone rake seaweed.

Proofreading. However state-of-the-art the scanner may be, a digitized document will invariably have errors due to misreading by the camera. The word "in" for instance may be interpreted by the scanner as "m". Thus a proofreader must view and clean up the obvious glitches in the first-pass RTF (Rich Text Format) file created by the scanner. That process is called OCR - Optical Character Recognition. The RTF is then closely read and corrected by a proofreader who compares it word by word and line by line to the original published copy of the book. If you are ever given a choice between proofreading a text file and spending six months in a sensory deprivation chamber, take the chamber.

Final Review. The RTF - the basic building block of e-books - must then be reviewed page by page by a designer to make sure it reads seamlessly. "Once a book gets scanned," explains Nathan Fernald, E-Reads' production manager, "it tends to lose all of its formatting with the exception of single line breaks. And line breaks must be clearly delineated to prevent scene shifts within a chapter from running into each other. When we get a file back from scanning, I have to flip through the physical book page-by-page, comparing it with the file to see if there was any formatting lost such as centered text, indented text, extra line breaks, etc."

The staggering monotony of this process will explain why I granted Nathan one day off every week. He was beginning to exhibit classic symptoms of going postal.

Formatting. Once we have a clean, error-free RTF we format it for various e-book platforms plus print on demand. For print editions, cover art must be sized precisely to the trim of the book using charts comparable to those used to navigate the waters off the Cape of Good Hope.

As if these labors were not excruciatingly demanding enough, we must then create...

Metadata. Metadata is vital book-related information required by retailers. It includes cover image, ISBN number, BISAC code, language, territorial rights, suggested retail price, publication date, brief description and other details and data. Retailers provide pages and pages of metadata definitions, specs and tolerances, all in fine print. And each retailer has different requirements or a different order of the same requirements. You can read about it in detail in Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata, but - long story short - it is comparable in complexity to the instructions for applying for a Fulbright grant, except that you can get away with lying on a Fulbright application.

ISBN Management. ISBNs are unique identifying numbers used in the book industry. They identify not just a book but every edition of a book. Publishing companies purchase a block of ISBNs and, after assigning them to each edition of each book, register them with R.R. Bowker, the official ISBN agency in the United States. (You can read more in Learning to Love your ISBN Number.) Of all the lassitude-inducing tasks performed by our staff, none compares to selecting, assigning, maintaining and registering ISBN numbers. It is like sorting jelly beans by color, except that when you are finished you are obliged to ship the jelly beans to a facility where someone else will eat them. Tales of woe abound. For instance, just when we had become resigned to the Sisyphean labors of managing 10-digit ISBNs the gods imposed 13-digit ones on us. Then Amazon informed us that none of our ISBN's were suitable for the Kindle, and required us to produce unique Amazon identifier codes.

Royalty Management. Retailers furnish sales information in spreadsheets. In an ideal world the formats and information fields would be uniform. In reality royalty reporting is the Second Coming of the Tower of Babel. We have to reformat each and every retailer's report so that our accounting system can read and process it. Though it is universally agreed that ISBN numbers are the key to successful royalty report generation, our filters constantly catch busted numbers requiring hours of sleuthing to set right. We find rogue data in other columns, too. All it takes is one misplaced article - "The"at the beginning of a title instead of at the end, for instance - to send our royalty tracker into paroxysms of indignation followed by stern instructions to mercilessly hunt and correct the offensive mistake.

There is much more that I haven't reported, but I'm afraid it would make you suicidally depressed. I asked John Douglas, who manages our database, to tell us what is boring about his job. "I'm sorry, I don't have time to tell you," he replied. "I'm too busy doing a boring job."

In conclusion, Mr. O'Reilly, be careful what you wish for when you wish for boring stuff.

The most exciting thing about being in the e-book space is telling people that we are in the e-book space. Showing off a cool e-book to a civilian? That's exciting. But making the e-book you're showing off? I think I'd rather watch paint dry.

Richard Curtis

Do Not Read This to Your Children: Linda Jones's Big Bad Wolf 21 Mar 2010, 12:00 am

As redhead Molly Kincaid travels blithely through the forest on her way to her grandmother's house, she comes me upon a wolf - Wolf Trevelayan. His enormous stature and dark, penetrating gaze make him an intimidating presence in these deep, dense Maine woods. And what she knows of his tangled past frightens her too. The strange death of his first wife, his sinister habits, his secretive demeanor - they all point to Trouble. But for Molly, no rumors can trump the deep attraction she feels, a lust for Wolf that consumes her body and soul. She would willingly bow to his wild ways, even if it means leaving everything she loves and allowing him to guide her into the unknown...

Big Bad Wolf is one of a number of dark retellings of fairy tales for adults written by USA Today bestselling author Linda Jones. Jones has written more than fifty romance books in several subgenres, including historical and romantic suspense. Click on her author page and check out 15 more of her books including several more wicked fairy tales.

Something Extra from Janet Dailey 20 Mar 2010, 12:00 am

In Something Extra by romance superstar Janet Dailey, Jolie Antoinette Smith wants to marry the man of her dreams. But when she meets that man in the form of brash and confident Louisiana native Steve Cameron, he quite clearly wants something different. Jolie's sensitive soul and passionate heart are now at odds--and she wishes she had never found true love!

E-Reads publishes almost sixty classic Janet Dailey romances. Visit our store and fill in the gaps in your reading list.

January '10 E-Book Sales Almost Quadruple January '09 19 Mar 2010, 3:19 pm

If your head is still spinning after 2009's triple digit growth rate, you'll need a clamp to steady your skull when you read that January 2010 e-book sales posted a nearly 370% jump over the same month in 2009, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers. The numbers are $31,900,000 for January '10 compared to $8,800,000 for January '09. January was also the biggest e-sales month ever, and it wasn't even close. The biggest month to date was December '09 at $19,100,000.

IDPF reminds us that:

* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade e-book sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet or to hand-held reading devices"

The graph at at the top of the page shows sales through '09 but do not reflect January 2010.

Richard Curtis

Amazon Launches Spring Offensive 18 Mar 2010, 10:30 pm

How would you like to choose between the Amazon rock and the Apple hard place? That's the position several major publishers are in as both retailers pressure them to choose between conflicting business models.

Scarcely chastened by the damage it self-inflicted after its well publicized quarrel with Macmillan (see Publishing's Weekend War: 48 Hours that Changed an Industry), Amazon has once again threatened to turn off Buy buttons for some major publishers that don't accede to their terms of sale. The problem is, all but one of the six major publishers have already made deals with Apple, and now Apple insists on the condition that "publishers not permit other retailers to sell any e-books for less than what is listed in the iBookstore."

Something's - or someone's - gotta give. You can buy ringside seats for $1500 apiece, or sit up here with us in the peanut gallery.

Read the Times article in full here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Cory Doctorow Discovers Why Publishers Get 90% and Authors 10% 18 Mar 2010, 10:05 am

When Cory Doctorow launched his Publishers Weekly column a few months ago, we wondered what publishers could learn from him as he chronicles his efforts to self-publish a book. Our conclusion? Everything.

However, his latest article suggests that there's something that he can learn from publishers. It's that publishing is an exceedingly complex communal enterprise, one that relies on a surprisingly fragile network of interdependencies. As in the famous proverb about losing a war for want of a horseshoe nail, the difference between success and failure of a book may have to do with extraneous factors such as the cost of gasoline or a strike at a paper mill. Some of those factors may seem preposterous, but preposterous or not they can render us totally helpless when they bring the progress of an enterprise to a dead halt.

That seems to be the bitter lesson Doctorow is learning, a lesson that anyone with more than half an hour of experience in the publishing industry knows all too well. An example is typesetting, and Doctorow's frustration with a delay has him talking to himself. "I completely failed to note that any delays in the typesetting would grind the whole process to a halt. No galleys, no proofs of the printing process, no chances to experiment with the small-scale printing, not until the book is in a print-ready form. Let that be a lesson to you, Doctorow: job one is typesetting, period."

"All these logistics remind me of why I'm a sole-proprietor freelancer," he concludes. "I hate managing people. I hate critical paths and project management. And I suck at it. None of this is a surprise. I knew that these details would be the hardest part of the self-publishing job, and it's been made harder because pretty much everyone is working for free or cheap as a favor, so I can't call them up and demand results."

Here's the thing. Managing people, critical paths, project management are what publishers do. They do it every day, and most of the time they do it very well. But, unlike Doctorow, they seldom get people to work free or cheap as a favor. They have to pay salaries and rent and warehousing and printing and shipping as well as advances and royalties. Which is why, as we stated in our title, publishers get 90% and authors get 10%, and they're entitled to it.

Yes, there is an alternative - do what Cory Doctorow is doing. But hopefully he has gained some respect for how the other half lives. "Hell," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "is other people." But other people do occasionally serve a useful purpose, and publishing books is one of them.

Read his article in full, The Little Things.

Richard Curtis

File-Share This. Court Judgment Costs Music Downloader $675,000. Book Pirates Next? 16 Mar 2010, 11:46 pm

One of the most Draconian suggestions for combating book piracy is to go after the people who download books from file-sharing sites. So far print and e-book publishers have refrained from doing so, mostly because it is bad public relations to sue customers. The music industry had no such scruples when, earlier in the decade, it went after music downloaders, taking some 30,000 of them to court. You have to be in extremis to do that. The music industry was in extremis.

Just about all of the cases except one were settled. (See Can You be Sued for Downloading a Book?) The one holdout was a fellow named Joel Tenenbaum, who opted not to accept a cheap settlement offer back in 2003, when he was accused of willfully infringing 30 songs by downloading and distributing them on fileshare website KaZaA. Last July a federal jury in Boston ordered him to pay $675,000 to various record companies - that's $22,500 per song.

"I'm thankful that it wasn't much bigger, that it wasn't millions," he said after the verdict. Well yes, but given that the average settlement was between $3,000 - $12,000, his statement was undoubtedly uttered through a clenched jaw and a stiff upper lip. His attorney says the penalty will bankrupt him.

"Oy Tenenbaum!"punned Ben Sheffner writing about the case for the ArsTechnica website.

The trial was a slam-dunk for the music industry. "Plaintiffs built their case with forensic evidence collected by MediaSentry, which showed that he was sharing over 800 songs from his computer on August 10, 2004," Sheffner says. "A subsequent examination of his computer showed that Tenenbaum had used a variety of different peer-to-peer programs, from Napster to KaZaA to AudioGalaxy to iMesh, to obtain music for free, starting in 1999. And he continued to infringe, even after his father warned him in 2002 that he would get sued, even after he received a harshly-worded letter from the plaintiffs’ law firm in 2005, even after he was sued in 2007, and all the way through part of 2008."

It's hard to quantify the effects on would-be file-sharers of the suits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America, but it's safe to assume that the same peer-to-peer network that shared music shared news of the lawsuits as well, and downloaders sought easier pickings.

Like e-books.

The effect on music uploaders, at least KaZaA, was dramatic. Under tremendous legal pressure, the company changed its name to Kazaa and went straight. If you visit their website you'll see a banner proclaiming "Kazaa is 100% legal and supported by" such record labels as Atlantic, Warner, Sony, EMI and Atlantic.

If book publishers were willing to drop their misgivings about public relations, you might one day see a similar banner hoisted by a book pirate listing Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin and HarperCollins as supporters.

Richard Curtis

Emily Hahn's Ireland: A Brilliant Observer Turns Her Discerning Eye on a Fractured Emerald 16 Mar 2010, 12:00 am

A revolutionary woman for her time, Emily Hahn broke all of the rules of the 1920s from traveling dressed as a boy to working for the Red Cross in Belgium, becoming the concubine to a Shanghai poet, using opium, and bearing an illegitimate child. Hahn fought against the stereotype of female docility that characterized the post-Victorian era and was an advocate for the environment until her death at age of 92. A star journalist for the New Yorker, she wrote hundreds articles and fifty-two books including two of E-Reads' most popular titles, The Soong Sisters and China to Me.

In Fractured Emerald: Ireland she turns her observant and discerning eye to the troubled land of Ireland. In a magisterial combination of historical research and keen personal observation, Hahn gives us a view of Ireland's history from the legends of the great kings and heroes of myth to the saint who converted Ireland to Christianity. She details the tribulations of a conquered people as they rebel against their exploiters and fight and die for independence, eventually achieving their goal but only at the price of bitter divisions that haunts the country to this day. Hahn’s breadth of vision and acute sense of telling detail paints the big picture while also pinpointing the small but significant moments.

For other Emily Hahn books published by E-Reads visit her author page.

John Sargent Answers Four Questions 15 Mar 2010, 12:16 am

Early in March John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, issued a policy statement setting the course of his company and its component imprints such as St. Martins Press, Picador, Farrar Straus & Giroux, and Tor Books. He promised more such statements from time to time, and last week posted on the Macmillan website the second of them in which he boiled down to four the questions raised by people commenting on his initial blog.

As we approach Passover we wondered if these were the same four questions traditionally asked by children concerning the meaning of the holiday, which celebrates God's rescue of the Israelites from Egypt. We thus posted this picture of Charlton Heston as Moses before we realized that the four questions raised by Macmillan's correspondents were different from those posed at the Seder table. We decided to leave the picture up, however, as we are hopeful that "with a mighty arm and outstretched hand" Sargent will lead his company to the promised land and perhaps drag some Big Six publishing colleagues with him.

The questions are:

1) What is the difference between a “hardcover” and “paperback” e book?

2) Will retailers have flexibility to price books at a discount?

3) How can we trust Macmillan to carry out its pricing pledge?

4) Will we be re-pricing e books that have a $14.00 digital list price while there is a mass market paperback edition available?

For the answers, click here. All together now: "On all other nights..."

Sargent promises more commentary soon, "including author royalties…"

We welcome his outreach, look forward keenly to more of his enlightening clarifications, and thank him for his initiative and leadership.

Richard Curtis

She Controls the Light of Creation Itself. How Will She Use It? 14 Mar 2010, 12:00 am

With a thirty-five year career as a professor of physics behind him, James C. Glass launched a full time writing career in 1999. One of his proudest achievements is the Shanji trilogy. E-Reads has published two of them including the first, Shanji, as well as The Creators.

On the planet Shanji, a ruthless Emperor rules a subjugated people. Kati, raised by the lower caste Tumatsin, is taken captive by the Emperor's troops, but saved by The Searchers, who see her as the promised Empress of Light who can control the hot light of creation. But Kati's psychic powers can destroy a planet or star, and could be beyond everyone's control. She must decide how to use her powers when there is a planetary invasion from afar, led by a powerful Empress Kati thought was her friend and teacher. The barbarian girl must take charge of her own destiny, not only for herself but for Shanji and its neighboring worlds. Born with the heritage of two races, she must rule both of them.

In The Creators, the culminating book of the stunning SF trilogy that began with Shanji and Empress of Light, takes to its conclusion the tale of three generations of Creators. Kati, the light-wielding genetic changeling who saved her planet and became its empress, is now threatened with assassination. Yesui, the daughter who came to control mass as well as light, faces revolution and learns the uses of diplomacy. And Bao and Shaan, Yesui's twin daughters, take the lineage to its limit. Leaving our universe behind, they spin forth a radiant new creation.

Scarborough Fair and Other Stories 13 Mar 2010, 12:00 am

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough won a Nebula Award for her novel The Healer's War and has written more than a dozen other novels. She has collaborated with Anne McCaffrey, best-known for creating the Dragonriders of Pern, to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series. Scarborough Fair and Other Stories is a collection of favorite Scarborough tales including:

"The Mummies of the Motorway", 2001
"Final Vows", 1998
"Whirlwinds", 1998
"Worse Than the Curse", 2000
"Boon Companion", 2002
"Long Time Coming Home", with Rick Reaser, 2002
"Mu Mao and the Court Oracle", 2001
"Don’t Go Out in Holy Underwear or Victoria’s Secret or Space Panties!!!", 1996
"The Invisible Woman’s Clever Disguise", 2000
"A Rare Breed", 1995.

E-Reads carries two full-length works of Scarborough's fiction, The Godmother and Song of Sorcery.

Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata 11 Mar 2010, 11:25 pm

Okay, hotshot, so you want to be an e-book publisher? Piece of cake. All you have to do is provide your retailers with the following information about your books:

• eISBN
• Title
• Contributors
• Description
• Publisher
• Language
• Territorial Rights with Country Code
• Suggested Retail Price with country code
• Publication Date
• BISAC Code
  

Collectively, this information is known as Metadata, and unless you provide it for every title and in a format that is usable by retailers, the stores will not carry your e-books. And every retailer has its own format requirements.

Take the simple matter of book titles. What is your retailer's protocol for designating them? Do they prefer "The Grapes of Wrath" Or "Grapes of Wrath, The"? And how about the byline? "John Steinbeck"? Or "Steinbeck, John"?

Or take suggested retail price. Which currency are we talking about? US dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? British Pounds? And do you know the Country Code associated with the currency?

Then there's the matter of territorial rights. There's a code for every country in which you have the right to sell your books. Do you know the country code for Lesotho? Cameroon? Mozambique? How about the USA? Canada?

You'll need a 13-digit eISBN for each and every e-book. Do you have them? Know where to get them? Are they free or do you have to buy them?

And of course you'll need BISAC codes, the numbered subject headings organized to help retailers display books by topic. Are you publishing a fantasy? What kind of fantasy? Contemporary (FIC009010)? Historical (FIC009030)? Paranormal (FIC009050)? (You can read all about BISAC Codes here.)

What about your covers? What's the retailer's convention for image files, .png or .jpg? What's the minimum pixels per square inch? Minimum width in pixels?

There's lots more -- pages and pages of definitions, specs and tolerances in fine print provided by each retailer.

Still think any bozo can become an e-publisher? Do your Metadata homework and get back to me.

Richard Curtis

Comic Book Heroes Frozen as Amazon Turns Off Buy Buttons 11 Mar 2010, 8:30 am

Amazon has neutered the Buy buttons for all comic book and graphic novel publishers distributed by Diamond Comics Distributors, according to Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly. But this is not a trade dispute like Amazon vs. Macmillan, but rather "an effort to correct the glitch that caused the wild discounting of graphic novels on Amazon.com," writes Reid, who adds that "there has been speculation that the glitch was caused by Diamond."

Frozen in time, space and commerce are such leaders as Marvel, IDW, Dark Horse, Archaia, Image Comics, and Top Shelf. Reid explains that "Amazon has to do an audit to figure out which customers got books and at what prices."

When will the buttons be turned on again? It will take a superhero who can see into the future. "There is no timetable for when this will be completed," one source was quoted in Reid's news story.

Pictured is a sculpture by Mark Newman of Bobby Darke, a.k.a. Iceman, one of the original members of Professor Charles Xavier's X-Men.

RC

Book Ripped Off? Who You Gonna Call? Pirate Sinker! 11 Mar 2010, 12:35 am

Tag - You're IT!

That's the banner that Hank St. James's brandishes as he hurtles into battle with a book pirate. Only that's not what he calls them. His name for them is "parasites".

St. James is a piracy exterminator for hire. For a fee he monitors pirate sites and when he finds a client's book on one he emails a takedown notice to the bad guys. "Sometimes this entails as many as nine emails to get one book taken down from one site," he informs me. "They use some sites where they upload too and that site then re-ups to seven or eight other sites automatically."

He claims a high success rate, about 98% getting links removed within 1-3 days. "I've cracked most of the larger ones," he says.

Like anyone else in the law enforcement field, St. James's job is fraught with danger. "I have been threatened by one clown in Holland connected with [an underground website] when we had a five day running battle to get one of my authors works removed from his site. I've picked up viruses from some sites which my software has caught. Fifteen of those viruses are in quarantine, however, as there apparently is no antidote for the strains that infected my computer. So, the virus software simply isolated the virus."

Is Pirate Sinker cool and dispassionate? Hardly. "It is very frustrating, anger inducing work," he says. "Recently, John Simpson had a new book come out and that same day it was on [another underground website] which kinda sent me into a blue rage. These shoplifting parasites have no shame."

For more information you can reach him at piratesinker@gmail.com .

A number of publishers and organizations like Associated Press and The Financial Times have turned to a company called Attributor. Though not as dashing and glamorous as Pirate Sinker, Attributor boasts solid and respectable chops. "Attributor’s FairShare Guardian is the world’s first web-wide monitoring and enforcement platform," says the company's website. One of the its customers is Hachette, publisher of such imprints as Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing. (See Hachette Hires Anti-Piracy Hammer.)

Richard Curtis

That Was Fast! Vooks Go Mainstream 10 Mar 2010, 8:50 am

If you're under the impression that vooks, the book/video hybrid, are the e-book equivalent of a garage band, check out John Makinson's vision for them. Makinson is CEO of Penguin Group, a company that reserves its garage for executive limos. Makinson recently demonstrated before a London conference how his company's books could spread their digital wings on the iPad. See a video below.

Penguin "will be embedding streaming audio, video and gaming into everything that we do," he told the conferees. "We'll be creating a lot of our content as applications."

Which means they are forsaking epub, which "is designed for narrative text but not this cool stuff that we're talking about now" and "for the time being at least we'll be creating a lot of our content as applications."

When an august publishing personage like John Makinson starts talking about "cool stuff," you know the revolution has seized the mainstream.

For more about vooks, read If They Asked Me, I Could Write a...Vook?, and for more about ePub, check out What is ePub and Why It's Important to You?

RC

Are You Futured Out? 8 Mar 2010, 11:26 pm

Until now, most folks returning from the annual Tools of Change conference have come away inspired and energized as the flint of old thinking met the steel of innovation. But this time publishing industry blogger Don Linn reported symptoms of future weariness. "We are in the midst of a bucketload of 'Future of Publishing' conferences and there is an element of conference fatigue setting in," he writes. "There's not much new under the sun: In the 2 1/2 days I was there, I didn't see or hear anything startling or revolutionary that hasn't been discussed in other conferences or even at previous TOC's."

His weltschmerz may be shared by others who attended the Digital Book World Conference in January, TOC in February, and face an intimidating gauntlet of convocations celebrating the future. Their common theme is that the future has arrived.

Well, if the future has arrived, can we get a discount on our registration fees? They're really starting to pile up.

Here's Linn's analysis which, in all seriousness, offers some cogent takeaways.

Richard Curtis

Shopping for Free E-Book? Here's Your Chance 8 Mar 2010, 3:00 pm

This is Read an eBook Week, with thousands of titles available at no cost, offered by many publishers in the hopes of attracting permanent devotees of downloads. E-Reads is a participant with a Warren Murphy "Destroyer" adventure and a Highlands historical romance by Hannah Howell. If the spike in visits to our website is any indicator, thousands of bargain hunters are endorsing the program. There is no better bargain than gratis.

Smashwords founder and blogger Mark Coker has interviewed Rita Toews, whose brainstorm seven years ago led to this annual tradition. "I hope to introduce electronic books to people who have been skeptical about them in the past," she tells Coker on Huffington Post. "I also hope to give Joe and Jane E. Author a place to get their writing noticed. Now that the traditional publishing houses have shown an interest in e-books it is hard for the unrecognized author to spread the word about their books."

RC

What Publishers Can Learn From Cablevision-ABC Feud 8 Mar 2010, 9:09 am

When the publishers of #1 bestselling hardcover Game Change windowed the e-book edition rather than issue it simultaneously, Kindle owners protested by deliberately downgrading the book in their Amazon reviews. Their action, which fell somewhere between populist revolt and temper tantrum, elicited an editorial by Publishers Lunch's Michael Cader urging publishers to do a better job educating the public. "Publishing people who care about these pricing discussions need to get in the online forums and start issuing press releases and find other ways to address readers honestly about price," he said. We agreed with him.

We've changed our minds.

What made us change our minds was the confrontation between Cablevision and ABC over how much the cable provider should pay ABC to carry its programs. Held as hostage was the Academy Awards, one of the most watched shows on the annual television calendar.

The reaction of subscribers was identical to that of Kindle owners deprived of Game Change. They didn't understand the issues, nor did they give a damn who was in the wrong. They wanted their Academy Awards, and they wanted them now. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, said this about the blackout: "When pulling a signal becomes the nuclear option in negotiation, it inflicts collateral damage on consumers who pay their bills and have done nothing wrong. Someone needs to be speaking up for them in this dispute and those like them, and make no mistake, this is the latest example of consumers getting caught in the middle because the high stakes incentives created in these negotiations are not working for the average customer who just expects their programming to be there when they want it."

Fortunately for the average customer, the dispute was settled in time. (Actually about 18 minutes late, occasioning the wry observation by New York Magazine's blogger that subscribers blessedly missed the egg laid by co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.)

The moral of Cablevision vs. ABC as far as the publishing industry is concerned is that consumers have no patience for such arcane issues as windowing, loss leader pricing or agency business models. They expect their book when they hit Download and they want it at a reasonable price. Educational initiatives are a waste of time. We need to get our pricing act together. Though there is no Academy Awards show to bring us to the brink of catastrophe, the e-book industry will not realize its full potential until we provide our products reliably and at prices that make sense to customers.

Richard Curtis

E-Book Week at E-Reads: Free Downloads from Warren Murphy and Hannah Howell! 7 Mar 2010, 6:00 am

To help promote E-Book Week (March 7-13th), E-Reads is making two of our favorite books available as free downloads in PDF format, exclusively from our website and for one week only!* We know you'll love these two titles and come back to read more titles available from E-Reads. So, enjoy!

Highland Hearts by Hannah Howell (Romance)

A villainous rogue abducts Contessa Tess from her uncle's castle in the Scottish highlands, and when he reveals her uncle's terrifying plans, she follows him into a whirlwind of adventure and realizes that there is a hero beneath his criminal facade. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Hannah Howell at E-Reads.)

To download PDF, click here.




Ship of Death (Destroyer 28) by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (Action/Adventure)

Beware Greeks bearing gifts - especially when it's billionaire Demosthenes Skouratis selling the biggest pleasure cruise ship ever built to the United Nations for their headquarters. CHEAP! Over three times the size of the QE II, this huge vessel has everything from high tech offices and communications equipment to luxury spas, casinos, restaurants and palatial apartments. But the deal doesn't include a dozen dead bodies and a hull full of bombs being rigged to explode the night of the opening gala! And Remo Williams, the Destroyer, plans to crash the party. Tipped off the plot when CURE director Harry Smith is getting beaten up by some tough crew members, Remo and Sinanju master Chiun blast full steam ahead, drowning the sleazy rats and save the UN from a watery grave. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Warren Murphy at E-Reads.)

To download PDF, click here.


To learn more about E-Book Week, visit the website ebookweek.com to find other special promotions by E-Book publishers.

* Terms of Service: These two titles are available for free to end-users only when downloaded from E-Reads.com. All distribution rights are reserved and they must not be redistributed in any way or form. Please do not link directly to these PDF files.

A Film and a Novel Illuminate the Book of Kells 5 Mar 2010, 11:08 pm

The Secret of Kells is a surprising dark-horse candidate for an Oscar for best animated feature. It's the story of a boy, living in a Celtic abbey, whose imaginative adventures inspire the creation of the Book of Kells, the Thirteenth Century illuminated manuscript that is one of Ireland's priceless cultural treasures.

E-Reads has a Book Of Kells of its own, a fantasy novel by R. A. MacAvoy, author of such acclaimed works as Tea with the Black Dragon. In MacAvoy's book, a meek artist named John Thornburn and a warrior--like woman, Derval time-travel to ancient Ireland to avenge a Viking attack. Packed with fascinating details of historical time and place in Irish history and delicately balanced on the border between realism and fantasy, the story centers around that very Book of Kells.

E-Reads has a complete collection of MacAvoy's distinguished backlist. Click here to see it.

RC

Engadget Leaks MS Courier Tablet 5 Mar 2010, 5:30 pm

Nilay Patel has posted on Engadget a preview of the excruciatingly long awaited Microsoft Courier tablet. It could well give Apple's iPad a run for the money.

" We're told Courier will function as a 'digital journal,'" writes Patel, "and it's designed to be seriously portable: it's under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn't much bigger than a 5x7 photo when closed. That's a lot smaller than we expected...The interface appears to be pen-based and centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments...Most interestingly, it looks like the Courier will also serve as Microsoft's e-book device, with a dedicated ecosystem centered around reading."

No news on price or release date except a vague "Q3/Q4". Below is a video demo. For the full Engadget article click here.

RC