2017
May April February2016
June May2015
October September June April March2014
August JulySEE ALL ARCHIVES
June 25, 2009
Off Probation
I should probably spend this space welcoming you to the new website and telling you of its features. But . . . really . . .
When the WebMasters took me off the blog a while back—assuring me that it was only so that they could redesign the site—they probably saved you and me a lot of trouble. Certainly they kept me from ranting so easily about this and that.
All to the good.
Now that they’ve let me back on, here are some brief, mostly unrelated, points that would have appeared far less efficiently had I still been writing out loud over the past couple of months. The sequence is random.
• I don’t know why it always causes trouble when someone asserts that within the world of the novel there is reading for entertainment and there is reading for something other than entertainment—or that what one reads might matter because different ways of writing have different effects on the reader. Why is that controversial? Why does it always seem to raise charges of elitism? Each time that happens, in my mind’s eye is Stephen King, linen suited as the protestant evangelit.
• And for the life of me I can’t figure out why Sherman Alexie’s comments about the elitism of the Kindle caused trouble. If you put an expensive device between the text and the reader, which economic class of reader are you serving? Which ignoring? The more pervasive the ebook, the more absolute that effect. Isn’t it?
• Random House is treating Dan Brown’s new novel as a drop-in. (It wasn’t included in their catalog—as though its arrival surprised them.) Tell me this doesn’t indicate that RH really needs to corner the book market for at least one season.
• I’m so concerned about this for two reasons. First, the flood of RH fall titles is likely to wash out the remaining book review inches. Second, I imagine it has already put great burden on the buying budgets of most independent bookstores. Both of these are bad for every publisher who is not Random House. The situation is also bad for every Random House author whose book was not “designated” amongst all those star authors this season.
• I wonder if I’d have been so troubled by the severance package for Avin Domnitz if he hadn’t spent all those years completely focused on the big New York houses.
• Speaking of which, every bookseller attending BEA would actively search out the booths of Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, etc. So why doesn’t the ABA put the big-house booths on the edges of the show and give the active middle to the scrappy independent exhibitors?
• Every time I hear folks demanding that the price of ebooks go down, I realize again that the dominant pressure in the information economy is toward making content worth zero. Then I wonder what the folks who demand such a thing think about compensation for writers who create content—not only journalists (which opens another line of discussion) but most especially novelists and poets (which doesn’t).
• Ebooks and hardcopies are parallel delivery systems. They can and will survive side by side. So how am I to respond when a reader tells me that she doesn’t like a novel very much because Kindle’s iPhone app inserted line breaks and headings in the text?
• Rarely will a fiction publisher succeed by “verticalizing” upon the world portrayed in a novel—occasionally, maybe, but rarely.
• Indeed, few of the discussions about the future of the book divide out poetry, fiction, and other narrative forms. Their trajectory through the new technologies will be different from that of, say, self-help. And trying to lump them simply into a model that arises from non-narrative publishing is to attempt some sort of intellectual contortion.
• Is there no sense of irony when PW reports that “The St. Martin’s imprint, long known for its backlist of solid genre mysteries, is now embarking on a plan to publish a blockbuster each month”?
• Independent publishers are shifting to online promotions and it seems The Big Houses are, too—to some extent. If online promotions are of no help to the chain booksellers, will sales at B&N over the first two weeks continue to be the measure of a book’s success and the determinant of its marketing trajectory?
• Realizing that I haven’t picked up my ebook reader in over two months, really I think it’s time for someone to ask Oprah how often she uses her best-friend Kindle these days.
• When media critics argue that newspapers shouldn’t put long-form investigative journalism onto their websites but learn to write for the computer screen and the iPhone—they are arguing to forego certain types of writing as no longer befitting the reader. That raises some pretty big questions, but is most certainly a re-assertion that The Medium is the Massage.
• And when a team as (apparently) bad as the Colorado Rockies can put together a string of 11 wins, I remember why I prefer that sport over all others.
Posted in: Publishers Blog, News/Press, | Keywords: dan brown, e-book, ebooks, kindle, newspress, publisher's blog, publishers blog, random house
Previous Entry: All Author Events | Next Entry: Summer Conference in Toronto
Comments
Courteous posting,very advisory.Thank you, very absorbing to read, you should be astonishing of your blog. I was truly relishing to check your subject matters from meter to time. We are depending forward to your potential posts.
Posted by make more friends 07/03 03:18 PM
This recession isn’t done, we’re just past the descent (and some will even argue that) The conservatives have no idea how to manage an economy as opposed to a household budget
Posted by Mississauga Condominiums 07/14 07:18 PM
Hello friend, I read your post and here you share really very nice info. I read your entire post and nice info on Dan Brown. Actually i read so many books which is written by Dan Brown. The book which i had read was The Lost Symbol. The book was really very nice. I never heard about Random House book which is written by Dan Brown. I am great fan of this author and thanks for sharing nice info here.
Posted by Dan Brown 10/30 05:19 AM