Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  He was at one end of a conference-room table, and it felt like an interrogation. I usually associate Disney with talking animals and spinning teacups and walking brooms, but when you’re actually being yelled at by Disney, you see the dark side of the Magic Kingdom. But I don’t hold it against them. An hour earlier, I was in the same conference room, but that time, a vice president of HarperCollins was screaming at me. An hour later, another publisher would be yelling at me.

  The screams got worse every year, louder and louder. Publishers love to hate Amazon. Even before Kindle, Amazon’s relationship with the publishing world was like that of an aging couple. They were forever arguing with one another, but still married after all these years.

  It didn’t matter what we yelled about in any given year. The next year, it would be something different—but we’d always shake hands and smile when it was all done. The Amazon folks would move on to confrontations with the next publisher, and the vice president of Disney would go on to yell at Apple or Sony. It’s a dance we did every year underneath the trade show floor.

  On the floor itself, you could get autographs from famous authors, pick up complimentary books or comics, hold the latest e-readers in your hands, and swap business cards with thousands of small publishers and independents on the book-publishing sidelines.

  But two stories below the trade show floors—in underground conference rooms laid out like Cuban detention cells—the real wheeling and dealing happened. Everyone’s shirts were rumpled with sweat and exertion, and people were pounding their fists on tables. And yet, everyone smiled to themselves, because everyone was getting something from these negotiations.

  The same unholy shrieking happens every year at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany—the screams are just more guttural. Even at the London Book Fair, now that ebooks have taken off, strained smiles break through the British reserve of once-formal publishers. That’s because serious amounts of money are involved every year at these negotiations, and that’s true all around the world.

  Book readers are mostly oblivious to these backdoor, underground conversations, because the content keeps flowing, and the struggles behind the scenes are just part of business as usual. But they are struggles for everyone in publishing.

  You see, most everyone in publishing came into it with an arts background, a degree in writing. These are people who have read Homer and Aeschylus, who can tell the difference between a simile and a metaphor. They can spot a good book when they see one. But nothing in college prepared them for these blood-elevating, stress-inducing fistfights with words.

  They came to publishing because of their love of words and their love of language, because of that imaginative faculty we all possess that somehow switches on when we’re immersed in a book—when the real world peels away like an ugly scab and we’re left with fresh new skin underneath, entranced by this imaginative new world. Maybe that’s what kept us going through all those negotiations at trade shows like BookExpo America.

  When it was all done, everyone would smile through thin lips and shake hands, and there’d be an invitation to a party at the Flatiron Building, where everyone would get drunk together with Whoopi Goldberg and Spiderman. All these publishing executives would party with actors and authors and swill manhattans as if Tuesday was the new Friday, but they’d come back to those underground conference rooms the next day, their hangovers pounding in their heads and their fists pounding on the conference-room tables. We reenacted this ritual every year out of misguided self-interest. But if we didn’t reenact this, books would have piled up at the publisher’s offices in Midtown Manhattan and you’d have had no way to buy your books.

  Even though books are moving to digital, events like BookExpo America are as strong as ever. Likewise, the American Concrete Institute still meets once a year at its main trade show, even though concrete is as old as the Roman Empire. Whenever industries are held together by relationships, you’ll still find people meeting every year. So we won’t see trade shows like BookExpo America fade or move entirely to chat-room windows on computers just because books are going digital. And especially not now, while the ebook revolution is in full swing and the relationships of key players are shifting on a near-daily basis.

  There’s a triad here between publisher, retailer, and author. Without any of these three, readers wouldn’t have any books to read. Authors write books, publishers package and print books, and retailers sell them. You can’t, for example, drive to Random House’s offices in Midtown Manhattan and ask to buy a copy of The Lost Symbol. They’re not going to sell it to you, and the security guards will chase you out. Nor can you drive to Dan Brown’s mansion and ask him for a copy. He has security guards too. Authors and publishers and retailers are in an intricate dance around one another, orbiting like stars in a triple-star system. It’s a complex, convoluted orbit, but this dance is ultimately for readers’ benefit.

  Publishers need readers. Gutenberg’s financiers sent envoys to trade shows in Florence and Paris. They went to promote his new Bibles and drum up pre-orders. We know this because in 1454, an envoy to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor traveled to Frankfurt for its annual fall fair. That year, the buzz was about a man with a new Bible on display that was “absolutely free from error and printed with extreme elegance.” According to the same envoy, “Buyers were said to be lined up even before the books were finished.”

  A year later, cardinals in the Catholic Church were trying to get copies of these remarkable Bibles, but they were sold out to monasteries, churches, and private buyers. So although I have an image of Gutenberg working in his sooty, sauerkraut-smelling workshop, using nothing but ink made by local manufacturers and paper from nearby forests and perhaps even lead and tin from mines right outside his city, commerce was still an outward, centripetal force in his world.

  In the early days of the printed book, publishers like Gutenberg served all three functions in the triad. In addition to printing and packaging the book, the publisher would often retail it by taking pre-orders or offering copies for sale to patrons afterward. Publishers were also often authors. Whether they took books from the public domain or commissioned their own or outright stole and retranslated works by other publishers, they functioned as authors for the first hundred years of publishing as we know it.

  Over time, the situation grew more complex with the establishment of a class of people who functioned as full-time authors and the establishment of retailers. So although in the early days publishers held all the power, we’re in a situation with the printed book now where these three functions are split.

  With ebooks, we’re seeing the three functions come together again. All the power is being centralized. But the publishers don’t have it. The retailers do.

  Some innovative publishers like HarperCollins and O’Reilly Media have built retail websites where you can buy and download ebooks directly from the publisher, and Harlequin does a great job with its own retail website. But those are the exceptions.

  What has publishers worried most is that retailers like Amazon are getting into the publishing space. Amazon does this in print with its CreateSpace and BookSurge self-publishing businesses, which allow authors who aren’t represented by agents or publishers to get their books into print. And it has its own ebook publishing program.

  Because publishers go after titles they think will sell well, they usually ignore self-published authors. Publishers have a nose for money as well as talent. Even if they guess wrong occasionally, they’re more discerning than not. And their discernment prevents the market from being flooded by books that nobody’s likely to read. Otherwise, there’d be nothing to stop everyone from writing their memoirs or books about their cats.

  But Amazon turned this practice on its head by encouraging authors who would otherwise be ignored by publishers to join with them, giving the retailer an exclusive on this content. So if one of these self-published books actually does well, Amazon alone has it and can prevent Barnes & Noble or Apple or anyone
else from selling that book.

  This is especially true for digital books, where Kindle’s exclusive file format prevents others from selling the content. Authors are flocking to self-publishing at places like Amazon because they can be assured of greater royalties—often up to 70 percent of the book’s list price, for digital anyway. That is pretty good when you consider that for print books, publishers often only pay an author back 10 percent of the book’s list price.

  As the museum curators of our imaginations, book publishers don’t like the undiscerning attitude that retailers are taking, how retailer-publishers like Amazon are just as happy to publish a potential bestseller as they are a book of bad cat poetry. (And believe me, there’s a lot of self-published cat poetry. In my opinion, only T. S. Eliot is allowed to write cat poetry.)

  Now, retailers have a lot to learn about being book-content curators, but you can see them starting. For example, Amazon has a team that buys rights to popular books and then republishes and repromotes them. And publishers have a lot to learn about retail, but you can see them starting too. Now that they’re in charge of their own prices, they have to learn about competitive pricing and how to price content for special times of the year like “dads and grads” sales events.

  The book industry is topsy-turvy now, but you can see how retailers might take over publishing, and it’s only natural to wonder if retailers will take over the role of authors, as well. You could imagine Apple commissioning authors to write books or hiring in-house talent to create them. You could imagine Barnes & Noble hiring MFA graduates to crank out novels or coming up with a loose affiliate network of independent writers under contract to write content in the way that the popular Dummies series of books does. You could imagine authorship becoming a corporate commodity. And with that, all three functions in the book triad could come together under retailers instead of under publishers, which is where they started in Gutenberg’s time.

  Regardless of where the book industry ends up, what’s clear is that power is shifting. And it’s going to shift toward those who understand technology best.

  The centripetal force of technology emboldens innovation, increases complexity, and gives readers more options. Regardless of who dominates the triad, readers win. We’re in a tremendous time now when content for ebooks is being sought from mainstream and indie publishers, from top-selling and unknown authors, from startups all around the globe, and even from established technology conglomerates like Google.

  Millions of texts across hundreds of libraries are being digitized, even tomes from the 1800s with pages often more brittle than pressed violets. Tech companies like Google and the Internet Archive are scanning all of this content so that the future will have these books.

  Big Five publishers are moving more or less quickly to accommodate this technological revolution. Some of them are posturing wildly with their arms waving, as if to say, “Yes, I’m part of this!” But in reality, they often just sit on committees and dabble from the sidelines. Mainstream publishers who still take their triple-martini lunches (yes, it still happens) and focus wholly on print books and established relationships between authors and agents and printers are neglecting the new players. The technologists, the software companies, and the entrepreneur-innovators move at a Silicon Valley pace, rather than the nine-to-five life of Manhattan publishers accustomed to taking all of August off as a vacation, as if Manhattan is somehow part of Italy.

  I spoke of the Big Five publishers, but perhaps the industry should start talking about the Big Six publishers, because Amazon is in publishing now. In addition to its self-publishing programs, it has a publishing imprint called Encore, which, in its own words, “uses information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.” It uses crowd-sourced reviews to help make its publishing decisions, rather than relying on the traditional editorial process.

  But even if Amazon doesn’t serve as a traditional editorial curator with Encore, other companies more than fill the void. And they’re not all publishers and retailers.

  Ebook innovation is also happening at two other kinds of places. The first is behind closed and double-locked corporate doors, behind walls of security, at tech companies like Apple and Amazon. The second place is on the fringes, right in public view.

  To me, the second kind of place is more interesting. That’s where passionate inventors come together to show off their latest homegrown e-readers or applications. In my time at Amazon, I found myself more at home with these kinds of people. I’d often fly at the drop of a hat to join one of their conferences. I liked the feeling of frenetic innovation, the fervency of the converted who gather together and create. These were builders. These were my people.

  One of the places I’d find myself was at the Internet Archive. Run by dot-com millionaire and former Amazonian Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive sees itself as a library for all kinds of media—instructional films from the 1950s, public domain ebooks, live concert recordings, even software and old video games from the 1980s. You can download them all for free from the Internet Archive.

  The Internet Archive is housed in a beautiful, whitewashed old church by the marina in San Francisco. When you walk inside, you feel something holy. You feel like this is the kind of place that deserves to safeguard our books and music, like that’s a holy mission. And maybe it is. There are still varnished wooden pews, even though the chapel has been converted to a massive conference room.

  Now that he’s made his millions, what Brewster does in life is based on idealism. There’s a subtle attitude you can see in someone who does that—a shift, a lightness of being, or something special in his bearing. Call it what you will, but something shows through in someone predisposed to ethical idealism.

  Brewster reminds me of an avuncular 1950s propeller-head, someone who would rather be tinkering and building a ham radio in his basement workshop, someone who enjoys the smell of a soldering iron. He was one of those dot-com millionaires who didn’t fit his image very well. But man, he loves books! He pays out of his own pocket for a small army of people to scan in old books to digitize them.

  He and the other idealists at the Internet Archive are like monks in the Middle Ages, only instead of recopying ancient manuscripts with pen and ink, they use massive server farms that hum underneath the wooden pews. The Internet Archive is like a Google held together by duct tape and idealism.

  Brewster organized great conferences, and I’d be the only person attending who represented a major ebook retailer, probably because Apple and the others didn’t have time for this. But I did. It was important. I’d be there in the back of the conference, listening to each person as they stood on the stage for a half hour with their PowerPoints, all those university professors and gee-whiz tech wizards and independent entrepreneurs.

  You have to understand that all of these people were genuinely interested in books. They were technological revolutionaries, but since they were often millionaires, they were more like revolutionaires. Anonymous though they may be to the eyes of history, these were people who were making the digital reading experience incrementally better. These were people who wanted to make ebooks more hi-fi, who were passionate about such things as style sheets, fonts, and ligatures. These were people who understood that we had to do more than just replicate what print books have given us over the last five hundred years. They knew that for ebooks to work, we’d have to make them better than print books.

  » » »

  When it comes to the soul of the ebook revolution, the smaller, independent ebook entrepreneurs can make contributions that are just as important as those of the technology giants. But the more the revolution marched forward, the more the tech giants began awakening to ebooks.

  And eventually, one giant in particular finally awoke from its slumber. A huge, new player made its mark on the book scene—one that was larger than Apple but playing by a different set of rules than anyone el
se: Google.

  Bookmark: Bookstores

  There’s a used bookstore in Seattle, right in Amazon’s shadow, called Couth Buzzard Books. When I talk to the owner, he says he isn’t worried about electronic books. “I used to be a teacher,” he says, “so as long as children are reading, it’s all good.” He just wants to ensure that people are reading, which I agree is important. That said, he’s going to retire in a few years, so is he worried about the future of print books? He shrugs his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter too much.”

  Maybe he’s wiser than I am, but I think print books still matter. A lot.

  Though I worked at Kindle for five years, though I own almost every e-reader known to man, though I pioneered the writing of ebooks more than ten years ago, and though I still love my Kindle, ironically I do have problems with digital books.

  When I was a student at MIT, I used to love going to the Avenue Victor Hugo Book Shop in Boston. It had cavernous rooms and creaky wooden floorboards and handwritten signs in the aisles directing you to some great reads. Like most independent bookstores, it’s shuttered now. In fact, most were shuttered in the 1990s with the advent of mass-market retail concerns like Borders and Barnes & Noble. Consumers got cheaper books and a wider selection of popular books, but they lost access to the more interesting obscure books. They also lost the feeling of connectedness, of being able to talk to patrons and storekeepers who also loved books.

  I think this loss sets us back, because sometimes the most interesting books are the ones that are hardest to find. They’re the books that Amazon never recommends to me and that even newer sites like Goodreads never get around to mentioning. Sometimes, to find a good book to read, you need to first find a kindred spirit—and that was often the special role filled by people who worked or shopped in independent bookstores.

  Some retailers, like Barnes & Noble, still have chairs set aside in their stores where customers can read and socialize. There are sometimes Tarot card readings, and if you bring your Nook into the store, you can get often get free desserts or coffee from the pastry bar. Fortunately, there are still great spaces where a community can come together around books.