From The New York Times:

In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper.

The last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. The Post said in a statement Wednesday that in the printed newspaper Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the commentary section, and Style & Arts. Book World will occasionally appear as a stand-alone print section oriented around special themes like summer reading or children’s books.

I can’t say that I lament this loss as much as some other book lovers do. Newspaper book review sections, no matter how highbrow and prestigious they are or were, simply cannot cover the breadth and scope of the book world today. It was always great to get a review in one of them, but so many worthy books were left out. The smart and active book community online is only just starting to make up for that, but clearly online is the future.

And that’s just fine.

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The New York Times sounds cheery about this news:

Fiction Reading Increases for Adults

But I have my doubts.

The scoop, the Times tells us, is this:

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

What’s changed?

The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

This does not cheer me, as a writer, reader, and publishing professional. People who read one book in a year are not readers. I don’t know what to call them — occasional book consumers, perhaps — but they’re not readers.

Readers are people who can’t not read. Readers read one book a week, sometimes one book a day — not every day, of course, but a reader has had the experience of devouring an entire book in a day because he or she simply couldn’t put the book down.

A truly significant survey of American reading habits would ask how many books (or short stories, or plays, or poems) one reads in a year. It would ask about library use, book purchases, and whether one trades and borrows books with other voracious readers in order to read even more. It would ask whether one has haunted a bookstore looking for a particular book, whether one has ever preordered the next book in a series in order to have to wait not one moment longer than necessary to read more in an ongoing story. It would ask whether one has ever sold or given away books in order to make room for more books.

Those people are readers. Putting readers on the same par with people who read one poem in a year is beyond misleading — it’s a disservice to those of us for whom books are a passion and an obsession.

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Returns can be such a problem for small publishers that one press has finally done what lots of them have probably dreamt of doing for years. According to Publishers Weekly:

Lots of small publishers complain about the financial problems caused by returns, but few, if any, have done what Jasmine-Jade Enterprises, parent company of Ellora’s Cave and Cerridwen Press, just did–sue Borders and Baker & Taylor over the matter. In separate civil suits filed in Summit County, Ohio the company is charging the two parties with breach of contract and fraud. The lawsuit is seeking at least $1 million in damages.

…

The complaint alleges that Borders and B&T “knowingly ordered excessive quantities of [Jasmine] titles in order to return the excess to [Jasmine], thereby generating a credit on Defendant’s account.” The number of returns were in the tens of thousands during the time in question, the complaint states. As a result of Borders and B&T’s action, Jasmine “incurred unnecessary business expenses such as shipping costs, as well as lost business opportunities, damage to its credit rating, loss of good will with vendors and authors and other consequential and incidental damages,” the complaint says.

It’s often perceived as a “problem” that print-on-demand books aren’t carried by most brick-and-mortar bookstores. But when we see the many genuine problems associated with the way the corporate publishing and bookselling industry has structured the industry — for the benefit of those corporations, of course, not for the benefit of readers or authors — it doesn’t look like such a big issue at all. The demands that big booksellers put on small presses have the result of keeping many worthy books off the radar of many readers, so that even many books published the “traditional” way — which is supposed to be superior to print-on-demand — never get into the hands of readers anyway.

All those physical books getting shipped back and forth, sitting in warehouses and storerooms, and never being read. This is superior how?

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Just stumbled across a new blog that collects headlines from around the Web in an attempt to record the ongoing slow death of the bloated corporate whales that are broadcast television, hoary print newspapers, mega record labels, and blockbuster book publishers.

Traditional Publishing, Rest in Peace explains itself as “an ephemeral chronicle of traditional media’s decline.”

Traditional publishing — with its emphasis on superstars, its waste of resources, and its bland, homogenized, lowest-common-denominator product — is dead! Long live the innovative, nimble, frugal, egalitarian, narrowcasting, original, creative new publishing!

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She hasn’t written it yet, but Scribner is paying her millions of dollars anyway, according to the Associated Press:

“As a rare witness to the private moments of one of our country’s most consequential presidencies, and as a first lady who has maintained a notable level of discretion, her memoir will provide a candid and personal perspective, and an enduring record, of the years that have already determined the court of the 21st century,” said Susan Maldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner.

Well, it could provide a candid and personal perspective on the last eight years, but whether it will is another question entirely. The New Yorker quotes representatives from a few other big New York publishing houses who were less than impressed with what Bush wanted to sell them:

The reception to Mrs. Bush’s pitch has been mixed so far. “She was not forthcoming about anything that I would consider controversial,” the publisher who met with her said. “We questioned her rigorously, but it was one-word answers. I considered it the worst, or the most frustrating, meeting of its sort that I’ve ever had.”…

“I chose not to meet with her,” a publisher at another company said. “I got the impression that everyone was totally underwhelmed by her. That’s why there’s so little buzz.”

Ouch.

Sort of in a roundabout way, mirror-image way, the prospect of Bush’s memoirs make me think of the 1883 classic Daughters of America or Women of the Century, a collection of mini bios of the lives and work of hundreds of extraordinary women. Some of the featured women are presidential wives, but others are philanthropists, educators, and activists. In fact, author Phebe A. Hanaford, a Quaker and abolitionist, broke new ground for women in American public life.

In her Dedication, Hanaford writes:

To the women of future centuries of the United States of America, this record of many women of the first and second centuries, whose lives were full of usefulness, and therefore worthy of renown and imitation.

It makes me wonder how truly intriguing Bush’s tale of her life in the White House can possibly be. Either she had no influence over her husband in any way that could have tempered some of the “consequences” of his presidency that we’ll be contending with for a long time, or else she didn’t want to temper them. Alas, I’m not sure that this First Lady is worthy of either renown or imitation.

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Heh. Looks like I’m not the only one railing against the corporate publishers and wondering how much more clueless they can get when it comes to meeting the needs of readers in the 21st century. Kassia Krozser at Booksquare looks at one infuriating instance of out-of-touch-ness (concerning ridiculous e-book prices) and then rants:

Let’s go through this one more time: ebooks are a new, different market. You, dear publishers, have been given that rarest of gifts: a new revenue stream (think: home video for the motion picture business). These books are not competition. While there are more than a few readers who would love the luxury of choice of format/style/device when it comes to purchasing and reading books (you’re reading one), the ebook customer is different than the print book customer. Even if your ebook sales are growing by leaps and bounds each quarter, they’re nowhere near the volume that print achieves.

You’re dealing with a different animal, and — wahoo! — you now have the opportunity to change how you do business. Let’s start with smarter pricing. No, let’s start with the idea that you, publishers, are not the only game in town. You don’t “own” these books, your authors do. Your job is to prove that you can distribute these books better and more profitably for those authors. While, certainly, selling Brisingr at $27.99 is potentially a lot of money for both you and the author, how many copies can you realistically expect to sell?

It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

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Oh, the poor babies!

The New York Times — as ever, demonstrating its cluelessness when it comes to understanding how most people live, even in New York City — is lamenting the “new austerity” that has apparently come to the corporate publishing industry in these tough economic times:

For decades the New York publishing world promised a romantic life of fancy lunches, sparkling parties, sophisticated banter and trips to spots like the Caribbean to pitch books to sales representatives. If the salaries were not exactly Wall Street caliber, well, they came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.

But that cushy schmooze fest seems to be winding down.

I’ve worked in New York publishing since I was 19 years old — and that’s 20 years ago — and I have never, ever encountered anything that bears any resemblance to that scenario. And I’ve worked for some of the biggest corporations the industry knows, including Condé Nast, Time Warner, and yes, even the Times’ publishing empire. I’m not suggesting that some way-upper echelon of employees don’t expect fancy lunches and trips to the Caribbean — I’m sure they do — but they have about as much in common with the typical publishing slave as GM’s CEO has with the guy who works on the assembly line.

Earlier today I likened the woes of corporate publishing to the woes of Detroit automakers, and that really is seeming more and more apt.

At least the Times is not completely ignoring how idiotically out of whack corporate publishing has become:

“This business was never meant to sustain limousines,” said Amanda Urban, a literary agent who represents Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, among other authors. Ms. Urban said she believed Bennett Cerf, a founder of Random House, once said something to that very effect. “At best, you can get a Town Car now and then,” she said. “It’s gotten out of scale, like a lot of businesses in this country.”

Trips to the Caribbean and expensive lunches are not about books, not about words, not about authors, not about readers. They’re about a particular, extremely narrow slice of the publishing industry that focuses on blockbusters — even if they’re complete nonsense, like the slew of “memoirs” that have recently turned out to be entirely invented, but never mind: they were worth multimillion-dollar advances anyway.

The Times can’t get enough of complaining that these bloated producers of processed book product are in trouble (as they should be), even when they’re wrong about it:

For authors it means the prospect of smaller advances and fewer books being acquired.

Well, it may mean smaller advances — except for celebrities, who are still being courted and coddled with impossible huge advances — and fewer books being acquired by these corporate publishers, but they’re clearly engaged in an ongoing campaign to prove themselves irrelevant. So why should authors care? There are plenty of small publishers — the ones who never sent editors to the Caribbean or gave them open-ending expense accounts for fancy lunches — still around to actually publish their books in a way consistent with getting them into the hands of readers, and not consistent with showing overpaid editors the high life.

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Amazon’s e-reader Kindle is still sold out for the next two to three months, but other similar toys are rushing in to fill the void. Could the era of the e-book, long promised, finally arrived? The New York Times thinks so:

[S]tepped-up competition may represent a coming of age for the entire idea of reading longer texts on a portable digital device.

“The perception is that e-books have been around for 10 years and haven’t done anything,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division. “But it’s happening now. This is really starting to take off.”

Reader resistance has always been perceived as the big bump in the road to widespread acceptance of e-books, and that appears to still be the case:

Nobody knows how much consumer habits will shift. Some of the most committed bibliophiles maintain an almost fetishistic devotion to the physical book. But the technology may have more appeal for particular kinds of people, like those who are the heaviest readers.

Me? I’d love a Kindle, but this sounds even better:

Polymer Vision, based in the Netherlands, demonstrated a device the size of a BlackBerry that has a five-inch rolled-up screen that can be unfurled for reading.

I can’t wait for the day when I can carry lots of books around in one tiny device that’s as easy to read as a paper book. I suspect that day is not far away.

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Like other bloated companies built around outmoded, pre-Internet paradigms, the big corporate publishing houses has been hit hard in the ongoing financial crisis. The online magazine Salon today posted a succinct summary of the implosion that narrows the industry’s problems down to this:

Thanks to conglomeration and corporate distribution models, some of publishing’s biggest houses were laid very low by the current stock market collapse. And scary holiday book sales figures compounded the industry’s woes, with recent news of a 20 percent drop in sales in October from last year’s book market. Even worse, Nielsen Book Scan reported a 6.6 percent drop in unit sales during early December. Not even the holiday season could bolster book sales.

…

All these factors have produced an industry slowdown that will affect all writers for years to come.

In fact, this won’t affect “all” writers at all. Corporate publishing has always been about keeping most writers away from print. Not everyone who thinks he can write and wants to be a published author is actually worth reading, of course, but as the explosion of self-publishing and independent boutique publishers like Cosimo has proven, there are plenty of writers who could never get near the traditional corporate publishers whose books are well worth reading and publishing. (J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, for example, were first published by boutique publisher Bloomsbury.)

What does Salon think will be the upshot of the shakeup?

As the corporate monoliths limp into 2009, a number of smaller, more independent houses could thrive during this recession. A few of those presses have structured themselves to avoid long-standing problems that got big publishing into this mess: high advances, long author lists and spiraling costs.

…

Who will survive publishing’s Ice Age? Undoubtedly, the companies that can command developments in the impending digital book revolution. Early next year, Amazon will release the second generation of the popular Kindle, and the Sony e-Reader currently has more than 300,000 users….

Neelan Choksi, Lexcycle’s chief operating officer, agrees that the midlist will suffer in coming years. “There’s going to be less support for smaller writers in the traditional publishing model, in the big buildings in Manhattan,” he explained. “But self-publishing and digital books haven’t been considered. This upheaval will cause many authors to look at the alternatives more seriously.”

But as former book editor and industry watcher Tom Engelhardt notes:

[M]ore than 550 years after the first Gutenberg Bible appeared, the printed book, still an unsurpassed technology for delivering information and experience, isn’t leaving the scene soon. It’s always worth remembering that, when those first printed books began to circulate in Western Europe, the previous form, the illuminated, hand-copied manuscript, did not disappear, despite what you might imagine. It lasted at least another century as a high-end collectible, which was largely what it had long been anyway.

Salon and Engelhardt miss the middle ground between books published under the old-fashioned corporate model and electronic-only e-books: print-on-demand, as Cosimo publishes. Digital publishing includes POD, which eliminates the need to print books in advance — requiring a huge investment in both the books as well as the space needed to store them — without eliminating the visceral pleasure of reading a physical book.

We at Cosimo have always thought that POD represented the future of book publishing, and it seems the marketplace is bearing us out.

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What with Oprah Winfrey’s ability to sell books well established, can there be any doubt that her endorsement of Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, will have an enormous impact on the device’s popularity?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, Amazon.com is offering Oprah’s viewers $50 off the price of Kindle — just enter the promotional code OPRAHWINFREY during the checkout process at Amazon.com to receive the discount. This offer is valid through November 1, 2008.

(Don’t tell anyone we said so, but you actually don’t have to be an Oprah viewer to take advantage of this offer.)

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