Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

not to mention one of the most revised books of all time

a real warrior for the cause

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Krug

Judith Krug, founder of Banned Books Week, dies
3 days ago

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — Judith Krug, a director of the Chicago-based American Library Association and a founder of its Banned Books Week, has died. She was 69.

Judith Platt, president of the ALA's Freedom to Read Foundation, says Krug (KROOG) died late Saturday at Evanston Hospital in suburban Chicago following a battle with stomach cancer. She says Krug had been ill for more than a year.

She had been head of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom since 1967.

Banned Books Weeks has been observed since 1982 during the last week of September. ALA officials say the event celebrates intellectual freedom.

http://www.slate.com/id/2216162/

something to think about vis proposed e-libraries

one wonders (too late sadly) what someone like DFW with all his digressions and footnotes could have done with hypertextuality for instance

I get easily confused

I had a conversation about the whole digital thing with a fairly well established author when he was doing a signing for us and he was the first author I'd heard who really put it into perspective - he pointed out that while the new tech distribution model in theory is democratic and great (just as with music) it's not just the publishers who are going to have to figure out new ways to make money. The writers themselves are looking at an entirely new economic model and it is going to be harder than ever to make a living

we are talking about going from significant cashflow (the advance) to dribs and drabs as front end purchases are made - the product took 1? 2? 3? years to create and complete and now? here's a buck, there's 2 bucks. anything today? nope. Hey 3 bucks today! yay... nothing today?

and there remains the issue of filtering your product from amongst the myriad of other books available, of raising the visibility of your product so that people will know it is there and will be interested in reading it. This is going to have to be done by some agency (if not the publisher then who? the author will be just another voice in the wilderness without some backing). what is their cut?

musicians dont really make all that much money on their product anymore they have to tour and put on shows to collect their paydays - it will be the same with authors only who is going to pay $200 for front row seats at staples center to hear Jonathan Lethem read?

Greg wrote: "I haven't seen the movie, though I don't doubt it's a mess. The book is really good. Not a life changer but a really well done novel. Ron Hansen is one of those writers who usually gets left out..."

when I was going thru my middle brow western phase (True Grit, Little Big Man, Welcome to Hardtimes, Deadwood, Smonk) I started this book and it just didnt catch fire for me - the fault was mine and I plan on giving it another shot

ps - the publishers give away mucho dinero to place all this drivel right up front

is it from the Ron Hansen book (and/or subsequent interminable film)?

wiki quote:

"Joel Coen cites Robert Altman's contemporary take on Chandler with The Long Goodbye as a primary influence on their film in the sense that The Big Lebowski "is just kind of informed by Chandler around the edges".[20:]"

not sure if I agree with this but it makes for interesting reading for all you would bes

"Why Ebooks Must Fail

This piece is about consumer or “trade” publishing as we call it in the industry. To begin, let’s review how a book becomes a book. A writer gets an agent who peddles a manuscript to an editor who buys the book. The Publisher then pays an advance against the future royalties. (N. B., trade books advances are often, if not nearly always, greater than the actual royalties earned.) The publisher edits, designs, produces, prints, binds, warehouses, and finally, distributes the book to resellers (retailers and wholesalers). Concurrently the publisher is out pre-selling in an attempt to get as many units shipped to resellers as possible.

Of all the work cited above, there are two, large-scale, out of pocket investments made by the publisher to create a trade book, the advance and the manufacturing. Advances should be viewed as controllable expenses, but in the competitive world we live in (well, used to anyway), Publishers outbid each other on a regular basis to get the rights to a title. Think of its as sports fans think of free agency (in the US) or transfer fees (in Europe) - everyone thinks they are outrageously high but short of colluding, there seems to be no way to control them.

As to the manufacturing costs, most publishers have spent the last decade focused on systematically driving down costs in manufacturing. However, no matter how much efficiency is achieved, there is only so much that can be driven out of any process that requires skilled people and non-renewable materials. The impact of advances and Manufacturing is frontloaded in the economics of book publishing. In other words, before a single dollar is earned, these costs hit the publisher. This has been the way publishing has worked for more than 100 years.

So how do publishers manage this difficult economic situation? We work extra hard to frontload sales by focusing marketing efforts on front list titles (Front list means this years new titles, as opposed to backlist which means everything publisher prior to this year). Big advances (in this sense meaning lots of orders in advance of the shipping date) drive up the number of copies shipped, which is when publishers “count” the income for a book - when it is shipped from the warehouse. However, savvy readers will notice a chink in the armor - books shipped do not mean books sold.

Trade books are pre-sold in far, far larger quantities than they will actually sell in a given period of time. In fact, the bigger the title, the greater the ratio of advance to sold units. The more copies advanced, the more it will sell - but the efficiency of sales falls as the number of advances copies increases. It’s a bedeviling issue for publishers as we generally sell front list to resellers on a returnable basis.

Trade publishing economics is predicated on the ability of retailers to mitigate their risk and return unsold inventory for full credit. (NB, not all retailers are designed this way - but the majority of bricks and mortar retailers in particular, are… especially the big box stores such as Costco who take huge positions on a relative handful of titles). So the publishers are in a funny position. To get top authors, they bid against each other and drive publishing costs through the roof. To recoup this investment, they have to pre-sell very hard and get too much inventory out onto the market, in order to bring in the cash to cover the investment. Then after some time, the unsold inventory comes back for credit, which forces us to publish more books in order to sustain our position! The cycle is never-ending and sounds all too similar to certain less than legit investment portfolios featured in recent headlines.
So what does all of this have to do with ebooks?

Well, for starters, ebooks don’t follow these rules. Ebooks are effectively sold on a consignment basis - meaning the money for the sale is distributed after the sale is made, not up front. Stores don’t buy inventory, they put the file in a database and distribute copies as they are sold. This means that ebooks don’t have a huge returns problem, but it also means they cannot generate short-term cash flow like print books do.

Furthermore, when you look at the pricing models that trade ebooks have engendered in the market, you see that publishers have allowed pricing to be controlled by forces that are looking to control over an emerging market rather than those who need to fund the content creation. Ebooks (at best) are selling for less than 50% of the hardcover price - often at 35-40%.

On the other hand, ebooks don’t carry the same costs of print books. There are clearly no manufacturing or printing costs. However, publishers still have to buy the rights to a book no matter if that is an ebook or a print book - paying advances against royalties. There is still the need to edit, design and produce the content. In fact, many think that there are greater development costs for ebooks as electronic media opens the work to connections to the world of the web and an incredible amount of related and enhancing content - all of which needs to be managed and edited.

Ebooks will still have to be sold and marketed, just in different ways as there will be far less reliance on an upfront advance buy-in, but far more reliance on ongoing marketing through the use of content and metadata - as well as user-generated content and promotion tools to get the book marketed. These are completely new expenses for publishers who traditionally think of marketing as publicity and display advertising for new books, not ongoing support and marketing for long-term sales.

Finally, the content and its metadata all need to be warehoused electronically which requires investment in technology and staff to manage the technology - be they in-house or a third party entity. Clearly ebooks aren’t free - they are perhaps as expensive or in some cases more expensive than print - yet they do not create large, short term cash flow to cover their costs. Ebooks, if successful, will sink the trade publishing industry.

And therein lies the dilemma… how does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot.

What this means is that unless a very different model evolves, ebooks can never become the dominant version of content sold by book publishers. It means that ebooks will always be priced to sell, but sold as an afterthought, not as the primary version of a work. It means that the need for blended e plus p models will evolve, in order to take advantage of all the great qualities of ebooks, while providing the financial support and structure that print offers. It means that consumer ebooks, as a stand-alone version of an intellectual property, must fail.

In a future post, I will explore potential models that address the issues explored above… one such model even enables us publishers to have our Ponzi scheme and ebooks too!"


http://www.blackplasticglasses.com/20...

but that's what's awesome about it - just the faintest hint of whimsy in good old mr marlowe

I just reread this and am also digesting yet but would offer this

it is also easy to overestimate what is going on here - on one level this is a fairly straightforward genre exercise adorned with some cool stuff about labyrinths

I just think it goes back to what Patty was saying - the term literary is not necessarily helpful shorthand for a subjective qualitative evaluation of a given text

&/or it is a semantically grounded term defined something like this:

lit⋅er⋅ar⋅y   /ˈlɪtəˌrɛri/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [lit-uh-rer-ee:] Show IPA
–adjective

1. pertaining to or of the nature of books and writings, esp. those classed as literature: literary history.
2. pertaining to authorship: literary style.
3. versed in or acquainted with literature; well-read.
4. engaged in or having the profession of literature or writing: a literary man.
5. characterized by an excessive or affected display of learning; stilted; pedantic.
6. preferring books to actual experience; bookish.

none of these definitions have anything to do with qualitative evaluation of the text (except maybe #5)

of course there's always this:

lit⋅er⋅a⋅ture   /ˈlɪtərətʃər, -ˌtʃʊər, ˈlɪtrə-/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [lit-er-uh-cher, -choor, li-truh-:] Show IPA
–noun

1. writings in which expression and form, in connection with ideas of permanent and universal interest, are characteristic or essential features, as poetry, novels, history, biography, and essays.

which leaves us with the socratic ecstasy of fugue-ing on the question of just exactly what are "ideas of permanent and universal interest" (bringing us back to the question of subjective valuation)

Adrian wrote: "Matt wrote: "Shatner didnt do the 'singing' on common people it was joe jackson"

But to give him his due, Shatner "performed" his part of the song. He might not have been as artful as Mabel Mercer..."

oh yeah he 'performed' his part, he 'performed' the shit out of his part

Shatner didnt do the 'singing' on common people it was joe jackson

the greater good

I dont follow what TSE is after at all - what exactly is Swift's 'positive point of view' in Gulliver (which he takes time to praise)? act of political cowardice if you ask me

I thought all of shakespeare's stuff was written by a contemporary (or contemporaries) of his