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Publishing's Grumpy Old Visionaries

Publishing's Grumpy Old Visionaries: True Believers in Books' Digital Future Science's Doubtful Advance

By Chris Allbritton and Sara Nelson

It's probably safe to say that no one really knows what lies ahead for the post-literate, corporatized, bottom-line-focused publishing industry. More than 400 years old, the business of books has, to say the least, been one of the most resistant to the changes brought about by the Internet and other new-media technologies.

Some would say only the young and fleet of foot have any chance of staying on top of what's happening in the $10.3 billion trade-book industry. Those people would be wrong. Three veterans of the publishing business—former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein, outspoken agent John Brockman and agent-turned-e-publishing-impresario Richard Curtis—have spent the bulk of their collective 200 or so years on Earth in this business, and their experience has given them their own ideas of where it's all going.

Epstein recently published Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future (W.W. Norton), an expansion of a much-discussed article in The New York Review of Books, of which he is a co-founder. His take: print-on-demand can revitalize a business that he says was practically destroyed by the rise of chain stores in the suburbs.

Brockman—who is an early pioneer of online book submissions; a founder of Edge.org, a site that addresses the ''digirati'' culture; and an agent for science and nonfiction projects—thinks the industry can't be saved, which is O.K. with him as long as his clients keep getting their checks. And Curtis thinks the key to publishing's survival is in agents morphing into publishers, which is what he has done by releasing his clients' works—most of them nonfiction by such authors as Harlan Ellison—in digital form.

Will publishing as we know it cease to exist? Will virtual book-buying become the norm? Will everybody in traditional publishing lose his and her job? Will readers take to the newfangled technology and contraptions designed for digital reading? While it may take a generation to find out, [INSIDE] took an afternoon to harness the trio's collective intellect and glean what these e-geezers have to teach the business's new kids.

[INSIDE]: How have the traditional roles of agent, publisher and author changed?

EPSTEIN: I said in my book that agents would very likely be the publishers of the future.

CURTIS: I'm doing it, and we're starting with backlist books, because backlist books are branded by previous publications and the names of the authors. We have now acquired a total of 1,200. We don't need editors at this point because we're not yet publishing original books.

EPSTEIN: Why do you think other agents haven't done this? They seem like the most likely people to do it, more likely than publishers.

CURTIS: Because agents are paralyzed by inertia and fear. They realize that—and John, you can really speak to this——they're in danger of becoming irrelevant as the relationship between buyer and seller intensifies and the need for a middle person decreases. Most agents will have to become more relevant to the digital process, [doing things] such as creating Web sites for clients and operating them as promotional vehicles for their clientele. Otherwise, authors are going to wake up and say, ''What do I need you for when I can go directly into the buying and selling process?''

EPSTEIN: That means there will have to be independent Web site managers, so to speak, who will handle these authors. And that's what publishers could become. It's the most natural thing in the world.

CURTIS: The hardest thing for an agent—and I'm sure this is true of you [indicating Brockman]—one of the reasons why agents are paralyzed is because of the conflict of interest. Because we've all grown up in a time when the roles were very clear-cut. There's an author who's represented by an agent; the agent goes to the publisher. For an agent to become a publisher, that sets off all sorts of conflict-of-interest bells. And most agents don't know how to emotionally handle that or address that.

EPSTEIN: I think Richard's idea [about agents becoming e-publishers], which I'm delighted by, is the future. I think it's going to be a little premature, because I think people will not want to read on screen as much as they want to read in book form.

BROCKMAN: There is a whole recent trend of thinking in the cognitive sciences of looking at the human as a machine made out of machines, and the mind as a computational device. And there are people like [physicist] Freeman Dyson who think about these questions from another point of view: whether we're meant to be analog devices. And the whole bit of the keyboard interface to the screen has always been very kludgy to me, and unnatural. Using my Palm and all these devices you're talking about, there's something about them I just don't like. And if anybody is going to like computers, it's me.

CURTIS: I say you guys are too old! There are generations growing up today who access information on a keyboard, for whom reading on a screen and manipulating information on a screen is second nature.

EPSTEIN: Are these the same kids who bought all those copies of Harry Potter?

CURTIS: The point is, children are growing up completely comfortable with handheld devices, whether it be a pager, a GameBoy, a reading device, a handheld radio. These same children can walk to school with a single multimedia device that will carry all their homework. This is already happening. Then you're just one step closer to a device that is not only a homework device and a schoolbook device, but also a reading-for-pleasure device. And those same devices, which today have only limited capacity for carrying text, those same devices will carry video. They'll be in color, they'll carry audio, they'll carry music. You'll be able to play a movie on it, play a game, call home, send an e-mail.

[INSIDE]: So despite all the turmoil that the Web has been going through, you still believe the industry will be radically transformed. Which traditional publishing jobs as we now know them do you think are going to get squeezed?

EPSTEIN: There will come a time when young people in publishing won't even know what the words ''sales conference'' mean. Or ''returns.'' Or ''warehouses.'' If it's possible for the contents of the book to be delivered from the author's mind via his or her Web site, then we can eliminate buying paper, ordering a printing, storing the books in a warehouse, sending reps out on the road to sell them. Marketing books will be different than dealing with Barnes & Noble and Borders, and taking returns. Those functions represent about 35 percent of a publisher's revenue, or a little bit more. Those sums will be redundant; you won't need to do that in the future. And the people who perform those tasks will probably be redundant, too. I'm sorry to say that, because some of them are good friends.

[INSIDE]: So who gets all the money publishers won't be spending on printing and storage and distribution? Authors?

EPSTEIN: I think so. The authors in this case will contribute much more value to the publishers than in the past, so they'll be entitled to a larger share of proceeds. I think 50 percent will be the minimum, and it may be 60 or 70 percent. But I think a Web publisher with a stable of 20 or 30 authors could do very well even with 15 percent of the proceeds. And, of course, the price to the end user will be much less because the costs of publishing will be much less.

CURTIS: There are authors who will say, ''Well, you can't pay me an advance, but the idea of getting a 50 percent royalty in the long run becomes very intriguing.'' And as the industry shifts to such a model, you're going to find the whole nature of thinking about advances changing. And advance prices may very well come down.

BROCKMAN: Do you think you're doing your clients a favor?

CURTIS: Remember, you're talking to a publisher.

BROCKMAN: All right, fine. But who's representing your old authors?

CURTIS: I am. I am. I think crossing the traditional lines where one can be both agent and publisher is a very attractive model. It gives maximum flexibility. As long as my authors are aware—full disclosure—and I conduct my business with integrity, the authors are really getting the best out of the flexibility.

EPSTEIN: I think in the electronic future, the competition will not only be represented by advances to authors, but by authors' shares of revenue. I think there will be tremendous pressure on that 50 percent. There's tremendous pressure right now for publishers to pay more than they can afford for a book. In the future, authors will be contributing most of the value, and all Web site publishers will be approximately alike. There will be some brilliant ones, some less brilliant ones, but my guess is they'll be pretty interchangeable.

BROCKMAN: I love Bertelsmann, and I love HarperCollins. Why? Because no one else is going to fork over millions of dollars on a book deal. Authors like that.

EPSTEIN: That's like saying Willie Sutton likes banks.

[INSIDE]: What do you think will be the biggest change in how buyers get and read books in the future?

EPSTEIN: My hunch is—and it's more than just a hunch—I think books will not be downloaded in any electronic form, they will be downloaded in a printed form on a machine that is capable of printing one copy at a time on demand, automatically. There will be no human intervention except to load the paper in. These machines will be at innumerable random locations. Like ATM machines, except for books.

[INSIDE]: Do you think ''big publishing'' will cease to exist?

EPSTEIN: Of course I think so. These companies won't be broken up, but they're untenable as they now exist. For one reason, trade-book publishing has never been profitable, and it can't be profitable. It's not in its nature to be profitable. It's been sustained historically by other publishing operations in the same corporation-textbooks, bibles, whatever. Or by rich people like Bennett Cerf [co-founder of Random House in 1925], who were very passionate about doing this but didn't have to make a living doing it. When these people got to the point of wanting to sell these businesses, they were getting old and had no succession. They sold their business to corporations; the corporations thought these were glamorous businesses. They used words like ''synergy,'' thinking that one thing leads to another. But that doesn't happen in the real world.

[INSIDE]: So you think synergy is a myth?

EPSTEIN: Of course.

CURTIS: I agree. Many publishers are acquired by entertainment complexes and conglomerates that have the idea that the books an editor acquires this morning will be on the producer's desk this afternoon. And we'll buy not only the audio, we'll do the movie, we'll do the merchandising. And it never materializes.

EPSTEIN: That synergy business never amounted to anything. When GE bought RCA and found that it also bought a company called Random House, it took one look at it and said, ''This isn't what we wanted. There's no way to make money at this. We've got to get rid of this.'' Eventually, a very, very rich man bought Random House [S.I. Newhouse of Advance Communications] because he liked the idea and he wanted to be associated with it. He ran it as well as he could. S.I. was a pretty good businessman. And after 12 years he saw the same thing: you cannot make money doing this. So now, Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck have bought all these imprints, the ghostly remains of once-interesting publishing companies. And once they get rid of their redundant overhead, combine the warehouses and that kind of thing, they, too, will end up with a bunch of unprofitable trade-publishing companies.

CURTIS: You will see a day, I think and hope, when the fast companies eat the slow ones, and the small companies will eat the big ones.

EPSTEIN: But the price of entry will be very low. So there might be a great many little companies that do this. And I think the more the better.

CURTIS: You can make a profit selling 100 copies of a book, and you contrast that to a company like Random House or Harper or Bertelsmann that loses money selling 500,000 copies of a book. This is a bizarre world.

BROCKMAN: I tell you what, Richard. You represent that first book. I'll represent the one that loses money.

CURTIS: I have the greatest respect for you, [John], but it's kind of a strip-mining way of approaching publishing—get your money out quickly. It's basically a way of making huge short-term profits.

BROCKMAN: You say that as a wise man looking down from the mountain. If you're representing an individual, you have a fiduciary responsibility to do the best you can, every deal you make. That's what I do. I like to do good books, but it's about business, something nobody's talking about at this table. Maybe you guys are working with the wrong authors. The whole world is not The New York Review of Books. I'm just saying that the culture's changing, and people may be reading different things.

[INSIDE]: So is it good, then, that the chain book stores exist and flourish?

BROCKMAN: It's not a bad thing for the public that people all over America can get to a bookstore.

EPSTEIN: It's a wonderful thing, but they can't find all the books we would like to sell them or all the books they would like to find.

BROCKMAN: No, you mean all the books you and your friends write to each other ... You talk about, with sadness, the sophisticated, independent booksellers. But I don't feel like I have to have a relationship with people who work in bookstores.

[INSIDE]: O.K., but a lot of people have relationships with books themselves—with the physical paper-and-ink product. What happens to that emotional and cultural resonance when you go from having a physical object to a virtual one?

CURTIS: Everybody saves the books that he or she reads. Your home library is basically a repository and extension of your intellect and your memory and your mind. So when I'm surrounded by my books, I feel like I'm surrounded by the totality of what I've read. And if that didn't exist there, I don't know if I would be the same person. But on the other hand, half of the books that I've read are no longer there, because they got sold, they got given away, I moved.

[INSIDE]: So will e-books replace ''real'' books, or will the next generation have both?

EPSTEIN: They'll co-exist.

BROCKMAN: For people our children's age, nobody knows. They'll figure it out for themselves

What Is an Apocalypse, and Why Can't People Just Call It Doomsday?

Introduction to How to Prosper in the Coming Apocalypse

The most important things for you to concern yourself with in the coming bad years is, Who's responsible and how can I get even? It is essential that we find someone to blame and really beat the hell out of him. Sure, the tragedy of the past is that we are condemned to repeat it, but does that make you feel any better? No! Your first task is to find a scapegoat.

It will be recalled that Germany in the 1930s blamed the Jews for its economic woes. Jews are good scapegoats because with their long pointy tails they are easily visible, but they are definitely not to blame for the present recession. True, one memorable bar mitzvah did wreck the economy of Scarsdale in the summer of 1976, but Scarsdale's economy had been shaky for some time anyway, what with the inordinate amount of money the town had spent on wall-to-wall carpeting for its sewer system.

Modern Americans are fortunate in having many scapegoats to blame: the Arabs for their oil pricing, the Russians for the arms race, the Japanese for their exports, the Federal Reserve, the bankers, welfare recipients, stockbrokers, Republicans, Democrats, the President, the Governor, the Mayor. Our common sense, however, tells us that none of these can accurately be cited as the source of America's financial doldrums.

That is because the true source of America's financial doldrums is the old American Basketball Association. This nation was doing just fine until the merger of the A.B.A. with the National Basketball Association. Our national debt just prior to the merger was a manageable five hundred billion dollars; only ten million people were out of work; and only fifteen million more people on welfare drained the nation's lifeblood; murder, rape, burglary, larceny, arson, and vandalism caused untold suffering to no more than one person in every three households.

But observe the astonishing change on the very day the A.B.A. and N.B.A. inked their pact: the balance of world geopolitics was violently and permanently altered, social unrest escalated at an unprecedented rate, and international recessionary trends manifested themselves with unwonted ferocity. Plus, it rained like hell that day--flooded subways, battered umbrellas, not a taxi to be had for love or money! What a mess!

It should be particularly noted that on that day, the cost of garbanzo beans registered an incredible 8.9 fluctuation on the Kremnitzer-Fergenmacher scale. Because garbanzos are vital to the production of reinforced pantyhose, they are traditionally used by social scientists as the most sensitive and accurate barometer of economic change. A mere three-ounce fluctuation in any given month has proven time and again to be a harbinger of good times or bad, and on A.B.A.-N.B.A. merger day you couldn't find a single can on the shelf of the A&P on Madison Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street. The very next week you had the Great Pantyhose Scare.

Note, too, the significant dip in sales of long-playing polka albums, virtually a mirror image of the growth in pro basketball salaries. Goddamn things fell right off the chart!

So I say, let's get these basketball players and hurt them bad. Break their fingers! Smash their kneecaps! Now, you say that punishing basketball players won't bring back a stable economy. Not true! In February 1978, when pro basketball was suspended for three days to allow for conversion of player heights to the metric system, the Dow Jones average soared, consumer prices leveled out for the first time since the McKinley assassination, and put-and-call volume on the Chicago sowbelly exchange hit a peak unmatched before or since. Actually, there weren't that many puts, but the calls! "Sowbellies! Sowbellies!" You couldn't cross Michigan Avenue without hearing some damn fool hollering, "Sowbellies!"

Copyright (c) Richard Curtis

Slush by The Numbers

Slush
(Excerpt from How to Be Your Own Literary Agent by Richard Curtis)

When the nation was younger, and publishing still known as the Gentleman’s Profession, most book publishers were happy to consider manuscripts submitted by unrepresented writers, and many a good book got published that way. But as publishing developed after World War II into big business, and literary agents rose to dominate the marketplace, publishers sharply veered away from unrepresented authors as significant sources of publishable material and began depending more and more heavily on agents to screen good properties from bad.

At length, the consolidation of the industry, aided by recessionary trends in the economy, completed the movement in that direction, and we are now at the point where very little unsolicited material is read by major trade-book publishers in the United States. For it is clearly cost-ineffective to retain editors to read “unagented” manuscripts when the ratio of acceptances to rejections is something on the order of one in ten thousand. (Unfortunately, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary does not yet recognize the verb “to agent,” but everyone in the business uses it, and so must you if you’re going to be doing your own . . . um . . . agenting.)

There are exceptions, but they only serve to prove the rule. Ordinary People by Judith Guest was plucked out of the unsolicited pile at Viking Press and went on to become a very big book and an even bigger movie. But according to the New York Times, it was also the first such manuscript accepted by Viking in twenty-seven years!

Manuscripts submitted to publishers by unrepresented authors are described by the depressing term slush, and slush they are, whether the work of a genius or the ravings of a lunatic. Insofar as any manuscript comes into a publishing company “over the transom” (uninvited), it falls under the official designation of Slush.

Although statistics are not available, I would guess that most trade publishers today do not read slush. They return it with printed rejection slips, frequently with a statement that they read material only if submitted by literary agents. As I say, the reasoning is cold-bloodedly economic. Assuming a publisher gets 5000 unagented manuscripts in a year (a figure I’m told is on the modest side), and a skillful editor can read and judge four every working day, and figure 225 working days a year, that’s less than 1000 manuscripts evaluated per editor per year. So you need four or five editors to plow through those 5000 manuscripts. Figure salaries for junior editors at this writing to be around $25,000 per annum, and you have an annual salary cost of $100,000 to $125,000 per year for the slush-pile staff. Then add fringe benefits and Social Security contributions. Recommended manuscripts must be read by senior editors, whose time must also be paid for. And what about the astronomical cost of returning all the rejected manuscripts whose authors have not included postage?

And so, if it is true that only one manuscript in thousands is worthy of acceptance by a publisher, you’re talking about a cost of well over $100,000 to discover it, not including the cost of publishing it. With a bottom line like that, it had better be one helluva book! But because most publishers don’t believe they will find such a consummate masterpiece under those bushels of over-the-transom submissions, they consider it more cost-effective to leave the sorting-out to the agents and spend the $100,000 where it can do more good– or at least where they think it can do more good. For this reason, it can be stated with some accuracy that an editor will read the most dismal piece of junk submitted by a literary agent faster and maybe even more attentively than he will a good book that comes in on the slush pile.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Copyright (c) 1983. 1984, 1996, 2003 by Richard Curtis. All rights reserved

Incentives? Or Shmears? A Window into Bookselling's Heart of Darkness

Bismarck said that it is unwise to look too closely into the way we make our laws or our sausages. You may be able think of some other things that don't bear up too well under intense scrutiny. High on my list is what publishers, particularly mass-market paperback publishers, have to do these days to get their merchandise displayed in and promoted by bookstores. It might be described as publishing's dirty little secret, except that it's not so little. In fact, it's become so pervasive that it touches everybody in publishing, even though not everybody is aware of it yet.

In fact, not everybody wants to know about it. Some years ago a friend of mine, a top-notch paperback salesman, phoned me to tell me he had just been hired by a hardcover publisher to launch its mass-market paperback line. "That's great," I said. "In eight weeks you'll be back on the street looking for another job."
"What do you mean?" he gasped.
"I don't think your boss wants to know what you have to do to get paperbacks sold. When he finds out, he'll want no part of it."
He reflected for a moment, "Yeah, well, it does get kind of nasty out there. And this man's such a gentleman . . ."
"That's why I give it eight weeks."
In due time he phoned me again, "You were wrong. It wasn't eight weeks. It was seven."

One of the things my friend's former boss didn't want to know about is exemplified by a good news-bad news story told to me by another publisher, the head of a small hardcover house. It happens that he was about to publish a celebrity biography and was pitching it at a bookstore chain. "We love it," the buyer said to him. "In fact, we'd like to do a feature piece about it in our promotional catalog."
"Wonderful!" said the publisher.
"It will cost you $7,500," the buyer said to him.
The publisher reeled with shock—but he ended up paying the $7,500. Why? "The alternative," he said, "was worse,"—meaning that had he not paid it, he was afraid that the chain would not carry the book.

This good news-bad news story is anything but a joke, for such experiences are common among publishers today. With far more books published than there is bookstore space to accommodate them comfortably, the struggle for advantage has driven publishers to resort to desperate and sometimes dubious measures. Just how dubious they are may be inferred by the number of publishing people who refuse to talk on the record about them. Although none stated that these measures are corrupt, neither could any deny that there is a bad aroma in the air around the book retailing business.

Paperback publishers and chains are locked in a serious predicament. Most publishers readily admit that there are too many books published. But none of them is willing to cut back on hard-won rack space. Rather than sacrifice that space, they fill it monthly with midlist genre titles, unnecessary reissues, and nonbooks that many bookstores feel they could easily live without. If publishers ever gave up that space, voluntarily or otherwise, they would lose a slot they might urgently want back one day to fill with a major release
.
The problem is particularly acute in the chain stores that do not specialize in books, such as merchandise and food marts, where book racks compete for space with breakfast cereal, toilet paper, or automobile products. There, a small number of slots is allotted for the hundreds of titles issued monthly. With so many books funneling into the space available for only one, something has to give: either fewer books will be displayed, or books will be displayed for a brief time so that all titles can get a week or two in the sun. In most nonbookstore outlets, the latter solution is impractical, and so books remain on display for one month. But which books? How are the finalists per month selected (fewer, actually, because so-called superreleases often take up more than one slot)? Well, as buyers for those stores are not particularly sophisticated about books, it should not be surprising that they often respond to the publisher offering them the most alluring inducements to stock a title.

The larger bookstores and bookstore chains do have more space to accommodate the monthly flood of books. For these retailers, then, the problem is not space but rather time and attention. A publisher wants to see its books carried in a store for eight weeks and displayed in the front where they catch the attention of browsers. Unless some kind of deal is proffered to the store, however, the unfit titles will survive on the shelf for a week instead of a month or two, particularly if they are not bylined by star authors. Books by stars usually get all the time and space they need; they sell themselves without a major investment of time and energy on the part of bookstore personnel. It's on the level of secondary books that the war is fought.

To overcome the problems of inadequate display space or inadequate display time for those books, publishers have developed the means to equalize the survival rate. One technique is to pay wholesalers a "slotting allowance" to carry certain titles on their shelves, to display them more prominently, or to promote them as bestsellers.

Another technique is to offer stores incentives in the form of extra discounts as a reward for meeting certain purchase quotas. These discount schedules are issued to all stores and are supposed to be applicable to all without favoritism. However, when deciding between an independent bookstore or small chain that can buy a small number of copies of a given title, and a giant chain that has the capacity to purchase many thousands, it is understandably hard for a publisher to refrain from offering a little something extra to the big buyer. Such discriminatory practices were asserted to be in restraint of trade in a legal action brought against several major paperback book companies by the Northern California Booksellers Association in the mid-1980s. Although the suit was settled, and the publishers have modified their discount schedules to make them equally accessible to all bookstores, the pressures that created the discriminatory practices haven't changed one bit, and revised discount policies may still be favoring the larger store chains. And the offering or soliciting of secret discounts is by no means unheard of, according to some sources I have interviewed.

Another area where ethical distinctions become blurry is the bookstore catalogue. In order to push their merchandise, independent bookstores or store chains issue a variety of promotional literature to the trade and to consumers. Obviously, not all the titles described in that literature will be afforded equal treatment: the ones that the publishers or stores are hyping will get featured coverage. Such coverage is expensive, however, and the stores cannot be expected to bear the load unsubsidized.

Most publishers do not begrudge stores a reasonable contribution to the production costs of catalogs. But some feel that the charges go beyond reasonable. It is impossible to determine whether or not this is so. For example, one recent bookstore chain rate card, issued to publishers in connection with its Preferred Reader Program—a sort of book club offering discounts and other benefits to members—invited publisher participants to pay $50,000 for a "top tier" in the Preferred Reader guide that the chain was to send out before Christmas. For that sum, a title would be one of ten books featured on a page in the Guide, get front-of-store display, and receive featured treatment in radio and newspaper ads. Was it worth $50,000 or more in sales to the publisher? If not, the publisher was free to elect a lower tier in the chain's program. On the fifth tier, for instance, $6,500 paid for a title to be one of fifteen on a page in the holiday catalogue but nothing more. Indeed, a publisher could elect not to feature a title in the catalogue at all—and risk being frozen out of all but the diminishing number of independent bookstores.

This very viewpoint was expressed to me by a publisher, who said, "The principal intent of these charges is not to sell books, it's to make a profit for the chains. Better than 50 percent of the time, advertising in a chain catalogue is not the way a publisher would spend his money if he had a choice. But we don't have a choice, and that's where we cross the line between voluntary co-op advertising and . . . well, maybe you can think of a polite way of putting it."

Although the large bookstore chains may not be all-powerful, it is nevertheless extremely intimidating to challenge them, and if you try, you'd better have some heavy artillery. One executive of a hardcover house told me about an experience he had when trying to line up a featured Christmas catalog position for a forthcoming book by a major bestselling writer. "They told us it would cost $26,000, and we told them to go to hell. They implied that they might not carry the book. We said fine, their competitor across the street will carry it. When they realized that they needed us as much as we needed them, they proposed a compromise. Some compromise! We took a smaller, cheaper ad in the catalog. But it did save face all around. I don't think we would have been so daring if the book hadn't been so important."

Chain-store people feel that the catalog issue is misunderstood, and they claim that they are actually doing publishers a favor by channeling money into catalog displays. They reason as follows: trade publishers contribute co-op advertising money to bookstore chains. They declare their co-op policies in writing. This money may either be applied to the cost of book ads in newspapers, or to anything else that will have the equivalent effect of an ad. And some chains feel that a feature in their catalogue, which is distributed to many thousands of accounts, is as effective as a couple of $10,000 or $20,000 ads in the New York Times, and maybe more. And even when stores or store chains do agree to take out a co-op book ad in a magazine or newspaper, the benefit often inures more to the publisher than to the sponsoring store, for consumers are attracted to the book in that ad, not necessarily to the store. Furthermore, print advertising space is usually cheaper for retailers than it is for publishers. By laying out the cost of the co-op ads, the stores confer a tremendous savings upon the publishers—a savings that publishers ill reward by settling their co-op bills very slowly, according to one store executive.

Another, and equally disturbing, practice requires publishers to pay bookstore chains a fee for the use of shelf space. It was originally developed by food and other merchandise chains. New manufacturers, or manufacturers attempting to distribute new lines and products, are charged what might be called an entry fee by the chain stores in order to guarantee that those stores will stock and display the merchandise. Although book distribution, particularly paperback book distribution, has never been one of the more savory branches of the publishing business (it's an offshoot of the trucking industry), the application of food-store chain "slotting allowances" to books today has been made possible by the rise of the enormous wholesale and retail bookstore chains in the last few decades.

Before we hasten to judgment, I should state that I was told that this concept was introduced not by the chains but by publishing executives seeking a competitive edge, and much of the initiative continues to come from publishers. ("How the hell do you think my books get on the shelves—jump up there by themselves?" one publisher growled at me.) But even if publishers do take the lead, the chains do not exactly mount vicious resistance. What is more likely is that publishers and booksellers are now locked in a nasty cycle of mutual inducement (there: I did find a polite way of putting it). It's a cycle from which no one is sure he wants to be released. "It's a terrible situation," one independent bookseller joked, "How come we're not taking advantage of it?"

In any event, today, slotting allowances are accepted as a necessity of doing business. New publishers, or publishers starting new lines and imprints, are confronted with the necessity of paying for the privilege of having their merchandise attractively positioned, or positioned at all. Publishers are often charged for dumps and other displays and for front-of-store positioning.

A typical example is a "Wholesaler Incentive Plan" offered by one paperback publisher. Among a variety of inducements offered in this letter to wholesale accounts is a schedule of payments to be made for positioning certain titles on the stores' bestseller list:

• 25¢ per copy to assist you in promoting the book slotted in your top
• 1 through 5
• 15¢ per copy to assist you in promoting the book slotting in your top
• 6 through 10
• 10¢ per copy to assist you in promoting the book slotted in your top
• 11 through 15
• 5¢ per copy to assist you in promoting the book slotted in your top
• 16 through 20
  

The books thus promoted actually go on a bestseller list: not the Publishers Weekly or New York Times bestseller list, but a distributor's bestseller list, similar to a food chain's weekly features. Store customers will thus see racks of "bestsellers" that do not necessarily have anything to do with nationwide lists. But the positions on those lists have been paid for with cash, and from the publishers' and stores' viewpoints, a bestseller is a bestseller.

Chain store and wholesaler spokespersons do not consider any of this unusual or alarming. They take the position that if a publisher thinks its book is terrific, let that publisher back up its claim with hard cash. One publisher did just that, and was therefore able to elevate a midlist author into a bestselling one. "As brutal as the system may be," he says, "in his case it worked. Ask that author if he thinks the system is unethical!" This may be a shortsighted attitude, however, because it does not take into account the financial and other tolls that fall upon publishers, consumers, and, ultimately, writers.

The dangers inherent in the practices I have described compelled the late Roberta Grossman, then publisher of Zebra/Pinnacle Books, to speak out in an article in Magazine and Bookseller, a publishing industry trade publication. This is the only instance I know of when a publishing person has gone on record on these matters, and if an executive of Zebra, a company that is no slouch in the aggressive marketing of its books, speaks out in concern, there is a great deal for the rest of us to be concerned about, too:

"Every time a publisher buys a book, he is putting his money where his mouth is in terms of investing in artwork type, printing, paper, promotion and advertising, to say nothing of shipping and such essential nonessentials as foiling and embossing, and really absorbing the entire financial gamble. All he asks in return is an opportunity to get his product displayed and give it exposure to the public, which has the final say on whether of not his bet will pay off. If our major accounts begin to have so much say in what we can distribute, and because of that, in what we ultimately publish, there is no doubt we will see an end to the excitement generated by new porducts and new talent."

These practices threaten the book industry and writing profession in many ways. For one thing, they intensify the financial pressures on smaller publishers. The house that cannot afford to pay a chain store for featuring its lead novel in the store's catalogue or for displaying that novel prominently will be at a comptitive disadvantage. So far, according to one publisher, the smaller houses have responded to the pressure by simply raising the prices of their products. But there is obviously a limit to how much a publisher can charge, and it only postpones the day of reckoning in the paperbook jungle. Meanwhile, the consumer absorbs the cost of bookstore positioning, promotion, and display, and higher book prices only force publishers to pay even more money for star authors whose bylines justify those prices.
Thus, the public pays in another way, for the quality of our literature must eventally suffer as publishers gravitate toward the safe, the familiar, and the formulaic. "Small- and medium-sized companies, often hotbeds of creativity, will vanish, or even worse, never come into being," said Zebra's Grossman. "New authors just won't be given a chance. The tried and true, the old and established will rule—with no successors on the horizon as tastes change or consumers demand something new and different. . . . Whether in the form of slotting fees, trade allowances, or co-op money, this system can only lead to a 'homogenization' of paperbacks, with only 'brand names' and 'safe' titles monopolizing shelf space."

When I was younger and worked for my father during summers in the garment business, I had many opportunities to observe how the wheels of that industry were lubricated. Payoffs and extortion were as common as the pushcarts that crowd the garment district's streets, and very little got done without somebody "shmearing"—the Yiddish word for paying off—somebody else. And after I entered publishing I had reason to feel good about my chosen profession after learning about corrupt practices in such related fields as the movie and record businesses. Perhaps because business on the editorial level is conducted on such a civilized plane, we have come to believe that the same degree of refinement applies down the line in the marketplace where the merchandise is moved. It is somewhat disconcerting, therefore, to learn that such elegant phrases as "sales incentives," "slotting allowances," "co-op contributions," and "display fees," may be euphemisms for something more akin to what was done in the garment business than to the way ladies and gentlemen conduct business upstairs in Editorial.

A bookstore executive to whom I mentioned the analogy pointed out some critical differences. Whereas the list prices of books are printed on the covers, the retail prices of garments adjust themselves in reaction to marketplace conditions. With much wider profit margins available, garment manufacturers have elbow room in which to merchandise their products that book publishers simply do not have. Above all, garment manufacturers do not have the blood-draining problem of returnability that book publishers and retailers have.
We must, therefore, not rush to judgment. The conditions down in the pit are responses to market forces beyond the control of the sales reps and the store buyers, and to some extent, are the result of policies forged in the lofty offices of publishing executives. There are simply too many books for too little space or time, and the brutal laws of supply and demand will not be suspended simply because the product is intellectual or artistic. But as the practices I've discussed seem to be becoming institutionalized on a level uncomfortably close to where the ladies and gentlemen in Editorial live, we should start asking ourselves where we should draw the line between incentives and shmears.

Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in This Business of Publishing: An Insider's View of Current Trends and Tactics Copyright © 1998 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

Revised and Sweetened Google Settlement

This is the text of the Authors' Guild Statement on the revised settlement filed with the court:

1. Smaller Class; Representation of Foreign Countries on Registry Board. We've narrowed down the class to authors and publishers of works registered in the U.S. and authors and publishers of works published in the three other countries that have contributed the largest number of English-language works to American libraries: Australia, Canada, and the U.K. Each of these countries will have an author and a publisher seat on the Book Rights Registry board.

2. Independent Fiduciary for Unclaimed Works. An independent fiduciary approved by the court will be solely responsible for decisions regarding unclaimed works.

3. Unclaimed Funds Held for up to 10 Years, Will Go Only to Charities and Finding Rightsholders. The Book Rights Registry will now hold unclaimed funds for ten years, instead of five. (After five years, one-quarter of the unclaimed funds can be earmarked for finding rightsholders.) There will be no distribution of any of the unclaimed funds to claiming rightsholders. Instead, unclaimed funds will go to charities in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia as determined by court order after 10 years.

4. Elimination of "Most-Favored Nation" Clause, Restrictions on Discounting. The so-called "most-favored nation" clause is out (if you don't know what it is, no need to get up to speed on it). Also out are various restrictions on discounting by Google. Authors will get their cut, regardless: Google's discounts still come out of its own pocket.

5. Well-Defined Future Potential Business Models. Future business models have been pared down to three: individual subscriptions, print-on-demand, and digital downloads. None of these business models can be implemented by Google without approval of the Registry's board, and none can be implemented without notice to all claiming rightsholders, who will have the absolute right not to participate. (The Unclaimed Works Fiduciary, of course, will determine whether unclaimed works will participate in any future business models.) Note: this doesn't affect the previously well-defined business models that get the green light on approval of the settlement -- ad-supported previews, consumer online editions, page-fees for print-outs from public access terminals, and institutional subscriptions.

6. Plenty of Time. There's extra time to make claims for the $60 to $300 per book digitization payments -- it's been extended to March 31, 2011. There's also plenty of time to remove your works from Google's database: you can ponder this until March 9, 2012. (Remember, we don't recommend removal, since it's irreversible: you'll remove yourself from this market forever.)

* * *

What hasn't changed? Almost everything else.

The settlement still provides these benefits to authors:

Find new readers. Out-of-print books need no longer be relegated to the used book market. The settlement will make out-of-print works available to hundreds of millions of readers, through ad-supported previews, sales of online editions, and institutional subscriptions. If a book catches on, there will be sales data to prove it, which may create an opportunity to bring the work back into print in traditional form.

In-print books are unaffected. A cardinal rule in the negotiations was not to disturb the market for in-print books. Titles that are in print won't be made available through any of the means described in the settlement, unless the author and publisher expressly want them to be.

A Book Rights Registry to protect rightsholders. A non-profit registry governed by authors and publishers will oversee the settlement on their behalf, to help make sure rightsholders receive the benefits they're entitled to. (Sign up for the Registry by filing a claim at googlebooksettlement.com.)

A fair share of revenues. 63% of gross revenues go to authors and publishers; Google keeps 37%. The funds will be paid to the new Book Rights Registry, which will pay authors and publishers after retaining a modest administrative fee. If rights have reverted to authors, they will receive 100% of the rightsholder revenue.

Unprecedented control for authors and publishers. Authors and publishers will manage their rights through an account management page at the Book Rights Registry. Authors who control rights to their works, for example, may choose to allow Google to display ad-supported previews of books, sell online editions (authors may set the price or let an algorithm do it for them), and license the work to colleges and universities, or they may choose to block all display uses. Authors can change their minds, at any time, with reasonable notice. What if a book comes back into traditional print? The rightsholder can then simply turn off all display uses, if it chooses, and permit the publisher to sell the work through standard retail outlets.

Authors' estates, too. Authors' estates exercise the same rights as authors.

At least $45 million in payments for unauthorized scanning. Any of Google's digitizing of in-copyright books done before May 5, 2009 is considered unauthorized under the settlement. Google will pay to obtain a release of these copyright infringement claims. Under the settlement, Google will pay at least $60 and as much as $300 to rightsholders for each book that it scanned without authority, for a total payment to rightsholders of at least $45 million.

Any Bonds Today?

Any Bonds Today?

As I write this I’m recalling a tune I haven’t heard since childhood.

Any bonds today?
Bonds of freedom,
That’s what I’m selling.
Any bonds today?

The ditty was written by Irving Berlin early in World War II to promote the National Defense Savings Program and sell Series E “War Bonds” to the American public. It was introduced in a short Looney Tunes cartoon by Bugs Bunny accompanied by Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd. Before long the Andrew Sisters picked it up.

The song was just one initiative in a huge government effort to raise money for the war. Movie stars like Rita Hayworth and Bette Davis performed in bond rallies; indeed, every segment of American society got into the act. For instance, Norman Rockwell spearheaded an art campaign with a series of illustrations. Even school children did their bit, selling war savings stamps to those who could not afford bonds. Overall, the effort was a huge success, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars from citizens, who purchased, at 75% of face value, bonds ranging in value from $25.00 to $10,000, which matured in ten years and yielded 2.9 percent.

As I look at the current administration’s efforts to restart our economy I wonder if such a campaign might succeed today to defray the cost of the recovery. The same passion and enthusiasm that swept Barack Obama into office could be channeled into boosting a bond sale effort. However drained the nation’s finances may be there are still many wealthy or at least comfortable people who might be persuaded to invest in a bond to help turn their nation’s finances around. And perhaps those who are less well heeled might be willing to set a little bit of money aside to save for a bond. Musicians, artists, movie and television celebrities would undoubtedly pitch in as they pitched into the election campaign. School children and college students are particularly resourceful in raising funds for patriotic causes. Obviously we wouldn’t call them “War” Bonds but there is no end of talent to coin the appropriate name.

We don’t have to do anything but repackage the existing Series EE bond, which sells for half face value and doubles in twenty years. Interest earned is exempt from state and local income taxes, and federal income tax can be deferred until the bond is redeemed. Currently, EE’s earn interest for thirty years.

Given all the complaints about foreign ownership of our nation’s assets, one especially appealing aspect of this proposal is that it would help restore ownership of our country back into the hands of its citizens. So –

Scrape up the most you can.
Here comes the freedom man
Asking you to buy a share of freedom today.

Richard Curtis

Author? What's an Author?

This was written in the mid-1990s and except for a few dated references like CD-ROM, which I'm going to leave in for the fun of it, it seems to be completely relevant to what is happening in the media this very day.

******************************
How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can't process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?

The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century's definition of "author" will be as far from today's definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.

The evolution of authors from unimedium creators to multimedia producers has been gaining momentum since the replacement of manual typewriters with electric ones, a phenomenon that any living soul in his or her mid-thirties or older has witnessed. The addition of computerized memory converted these dumb and passive typing machines into utilities possessing the potential for genuine partnership with writers. Each refinement in memory capacity, miniaturization, automation, and audiovisual display exponentially accelerated the typewriter's curve away from mere laborsaving device and toward a purely organic extension of the writer's mind.

At this point in time, we are at a place on the curve where typewriting has been supplanted by word processing, and word processing, in turn, has advanced into desktop publishing. This means that writers are capable of assuming the role of publishers in every function except distribution of their works to the consumer, and even this condition is on the way to being satisfied with the ongoing creation of electronic networks delivering intellectual creations directly to users.

The closer writers come to realizing that potential, the greater will be the pressure on them to expand their skills beyond effectively delivering the written word in print mode. It will be incumbent on them to navigate, and enable computer users to navigate, through a world of sights, sounds, colors, action, information, and special effects. The introduction of the optical disk, with its almost unimaginable memory and versatility, into the writers repertoire, makes their ascent to the next rung of evolution a foregone conclusion. But what is that rung, and how many others loom above it?

In order to answer those questions, one must have some general understanding of the technological environment confronting today's authors. The current device of choice is the word-processing function of the computer. However, the definition of word processing has been pushed further and further with each improvement in our ability to store and manipulate text. Color monitors, for example, have replaced the early monochrome models, enabling us to employ an incredible array of graphics to supplement and illustrate text. With each refinement, writers have found themselves blessed with options that were almost inconceivable a decade ago.

Technological growth is seldom achieved without a price, however. The same refinements that liberated writers from some kinds of concerns have saddled them with others. Our relationship with text has become complicated, if not obscured, by our need to master new writing tools. More and more of our creative energy has become dedicated to the selection of hardware, software, peripherals, and options. Each improvement challenges us not to become better writers but to become better engineers.

The introduction of the optical disk has only accelerated our momentum in this direction. The vast amounts of information necessary to produce moving images and sound in a computer are digitally encoded by laser and compressed, just as purely audio data is captured on compact discs. The nearly miraculous storage capacity of computer hard drives, floppy disks, and CD-ROMs (compact disc read-only memory) has added to the writer's toolbox two options of staggering power and versatility: interactivity and multimedia capability. Personal computer owners now have the ability to produce not just text, or text accompanied by still graphics, but fully realized audiovisual works. And thanks to the interactive properties of computers, users may now journey through a variety of links that make them active participants in the audiovisual experience.

The problem is, you can't take those journeys with conventional word-processing hardware and software. You can only get there from here by using an "authoring system." An authoring system enables a computer operator to incorporate video and sound into the presentation of creative ideas. Such creations are interactive, allowing the user to cut (nonsequentially if so desired) back and forth from movie scenes to animated graphics to straight text to still graphics to excerpts from documentaries and back again, all accompanied by speech, music, or sound effects.

Authoring systems were created in response to the fiendishly difficult task of programming graphical interfaces into word-processing systems. "Without having to write a single line of computer code, a person can design an endless variety of relatively simple yet functional multimedia programs," says the head of a New York-based multimedia production company. "Technically, the task of designing a multimedia work can now be performed by the average computer operator with nearly as much ease as operating a desktop-publishing program. However, multimedia also offers up a new and unique set of design problems to contend with."

Using an authoring program, you can develop virtually any fully functional application you wish to create. As of this writing, you must still be somewhat computer literate to flesh out your prototype program, but as the systems evolve, using them will become easier and easier.
You'll notice that I am judiciously avoiding the use of the word "author" in referring to creators of such works. That is because the act of creating computerized, interactive, multimedia works is not a function that must of necessity be performed by an author. It's closer to what movie producers do, transforming a variety of media into an integrated audiovisual experience for the viewer. Notice, too, that I say "viewer" and not "reader." For the same reason, the relationship of a user to such works is no longer that of a reader, but is closer to that of a moviegoer, television watcher, or player of interactive video games. Yes, reading may be required when text is involved, but experiencing multimedia goes as far beyond reading text as three-dimensional chess goes beyond the game that is played on a conventional chessboard.

As I acclimate myself to the rich atmosphere of computer technology, I hear the word "author" used less and less and "producer" used more and more to describe those who assemble, integrate, and purvey multimedia software packages to consumers. As the trend toward multimedia accelerates, as I predict it will, the role of the author must, without question, become subordinated to that of the producer. Authors will become scenarists, creating story lines for or textual supplements to full-motion video films for personal computers. The real creative stars will be those who can produce brilliant and stimulating programs for display on home entertainment systems.

Perhaps such individuals should be called "auteurs," the term used for artistic filmmakers who involve themselves in all aspects of making their movies, including writing the scripts, casting talent, directing, and editing. Says one futurist I talked to, "Those who have the vision to incorporate all the elements, and the skill to blend them harmoniously, will be the creative forces in the coming generation of media products."

The application of modern technology to the traditional tools of authorship is going to alter the way fiction is written, and is eventually going to alter it radically. Indeed, one can visualize a day when the term "written" will no longer adequately express the act of creation that conveys an author's vision to the mind of a reader.

An "authoring system" is the generic term for the software used to render these compositions on computers. These systems tie story elements, text, sound, still pictures, moving pictures, animation, and other media elements into a single multimedia package, a piece of software called a "title." The story's scenes and episodes may be linked together in the form of ever-expanding branches, or woven together in something closer to a web. The elements may be mixed and matched, presented sequentially or nonsequentially, separately or simultaneously. Authors can build into the programs a multitude of options for the user to link the elements, alter sounds and graphics (or even create new ones), and influence the direction that the story takes.

The fluidity and spontaneity with which the user navigates around the program resembles the human thinking and decision-making process. For this reason, such programs are referred to as hypermedia rather than multimedia. The content on a movie reel is presented linearly; it can move only forward in time; the viewer's attention is guided by the creator, whose decisions about what happens next are arbitrary and unalterable. In a hypermedia program, the user can access the content in a nonlinear, random way. He can, in other words, elect to go forward, backward, or sideways in time and space, starting anywhere and voyaging as far in any direction or dimension as the imagination of the program's creator, or the technical limits of hardware and software, can take him.

If you're beginning to realize that this changes the relationship between reader and story, you're right. It alters it profoundly. Geri Gay of Cornell University, in an article in The Hypertext and Hypermedia Handbook, a McGraw-Hill book, points out that hypermedia "has the potential to allow the reader to become an author of an interactive story." In short, the time is coming when you will not merely "read" a fictional work in hypermedia form, you will be able to collaborate with the author in its creation.

There are a number of systems from which today's would-be hypermedia authors can choose. Because things are moving so fast that these systems may be obsolete by the time you read this, I thought I would create a composite to give you a general idea of how twenty-first-century authors will be telling stories.

Suppose you had an idea for a science fiction story; a tale of two lovers cruelly separated in time and space. Betty has been abducted by time-warp pirates called Zomboids, and her beloved Edward must search the past, present, and future universe to find her. When he finally gets there, he discovers she has been carried off again, and so on and so on.

The first thing you'll have to do is write a story treatment and screenplay. In fact, if your program is to be interactive, you'll have to write a multitude of scenes branching off from the main story. You'll then have to design settings and sketch visualizations of your characters. As Huk the Hostile, the Zomboid emperor, and his alien buddies are rather protoplasmic (looking like spotted, half-deflated beach balls), you'll use a draw-and-paint package to design them, then animation tools to bring them to life. If you'd like Betty and Edward to resemble your favorite movie stars, you will be able to re-create them identically and three-dimensionally to make it seem as if you captured living actors on film. Or you can film or videotape actual actors. And if, like Alfred Hitchcock, you want to play a bit part in your own movie, you can film or tape yourself, or your kids, or your mother-in-law. Using your movie "toolbox," you'll employ an image scanner to convert still photographs of scenery or interiors into backgrounds, and from your digitized video file you'll be able to splice in some footage from a documentary or feature film, so that it looks like Edward's quest for Betty takes him to third-century Rome, twentieth-century New York, or twenty-third-century Moonbase.

You'll have written some dialogue to depict the bad guys plotting their evil deeds. You'll now record it, using a synthesizer to alter the pitch and timbre of your voice for each character so that you can play all the parts. You can also synthesize the sound effects. The hum of the cruising spacecraft, the howl of entry into Earth's atmosphere, the explosions of warfare, all are reproducible on a synthesizer. Or you can integrate recordings of real sounds into your audio track. The same goes for music.

Although most of these tasks today must be performed on a computer keyboard, or with a mouse, or both, it won't be long before the entire process will be voice activated and you'll simply tell your computer what to do: "Yo, computer. Lights! Camera! Action!"

Now that you've got all your components together, it's just a matter of creating as many scenes as you wish of past or future, so that the user can branch out interactively as Edward chases Huk the Hostile and Betty from one time and place to another. Your program will be so flexible that the user may substitute his own face and voice for those of the characters or enter other elements to individualize the movie. John Markoff, in the New York Times, reported a demonstration of a set of Apple multimedia extensions to the Macintosh operating system, in which a user took a video of himself riding a bicycle, then edited it into the final sprint of the Tour de France. In his version, he won the race.

The current state of authoring system art is not as advanced as I have portrayed it. Take the inclusion of video, for instance. Aside from crude home videos, the incorporation of professional-looking video into a hypermedia program is beyond the skill level of today's authors. And even if the technology were closer at hand than it is, you would still need to assemble a movie crew to make a studio-quality video for your title. And the technology is still in a relatively primitive stage. Scientists and engineers have not yet overcome the difficulty of compressing onto disks the immense amount of information necessary to display an abundancy of visual images, especially moving ones. Thus, most hypermedia titles today are heavily text oriented, or "hypertext," to use the phrase coined by computer guru Ted Nelson. Animation is currently the "motion picture" of choice, as it is more manipulable than video for the purpose of interactivity. But extensive animation also requires a digital density that is, at present, beyond the reach of most home "auteurs."

You can see from this brief tour that there is practically no resemblance between the activities of conventional writers and those of the individuals producing works of hypermedia. Let's look at the distinctions a bit more closely.

As you begin to design your scenario and screenplay, you'll immediately be struck by a profound realization: you no longer need the narrative skills you depended on when you wrote books. Although the first crude CD-ROM adaptations of fiction were narrated stories illustrated with still pictures or short segments of video or animation, it was quickly realized that a new art form had been born. Because you are in effect making movies the descriptive powers you used to call upon to create vivid prose images for your readers are of practically no value at all. You have become a screenwriter: those vivid images will not be portrayed in words but in pictures. And because it's much harder for a viewer to juggle a lot of expository information than it is for a novel reader, the stories you develop for your hypermedia programs are probably not very elaborate or subtle.

It won't be long before you realize that your storytelling expertise is of far less importance than your engineering abilities. Good novelists often talk about the way their books play like movies in their heads, and how they construct their scenes in their novels the way screenwriters construct scenes in films. Well, now you novelists will have a golden opportunity to convert those mental images literally into motion pictures. But the technical challenge may be far beyond your capabilities. Even more importantly, it may be far beyond your interest. Many of you facing these options will say to yourselves, If I'd wanted to be a screenwriter, I'd have gone to Hollywood, or, If I'd wanted to be an engineer, I'd have gone to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. You wanted to be a novelist.

Many writers must be wondering if there will be any market for their skills in the hypermedia age. I believe there will be. Students of technology are fond of pointing out that the advent of movies didn't destroy our taste for reading, and the advent of television didn't destroy our taste for movies. The advent of hypermedia will not strike a fatal blow to conventional literature written and published in the conventional way. "The technology to create hypermedia is available to authors who want to use it," one multimedia producer said to me. "I don't, however, think that in the near future, someone lacking the skill to create hypermedia fiction is going to be out of work." However, future authors who are not hypermedia/multimedia literate may well be at a disadvantage.

The prospects for readers may be brighter than they are for writers. With information presented in such graphic, colorful, and entertaining forms, the rewards of reading for pleasure may well give way to the joys of navigating through a multimedia program, experiencing fantastic audiovisual effects that readers never got out of old-fashioned books or even old-fashioned movies. And scholarship has become more fun now that, instead of having to trudge to a library and drudge at a desk, the library can be summoned by the touch of one's finger on a key or mouse, or by voice command to one's computer. And all that scholarly information is being presented in ways that are a delight to the eye and ear.

The revolution will not stop with the eye and ear. In a more distant future, the development and refinement of virtual reality technology will eventually tie in with hypermedia, bathing all of our senses in experiences that are all but indistinguishable from reality. From there it is not inconceivable that we will tap directly into the human brain, realizing a vision long cherished—and dreaded—by science-fiction writers.

Returning from the sublime to the mundane, we realize that the advent of hypermedia presents some genuine challenges to the traditional ways that intellectual property has been protected. What, for instance, happens to your copyright when a computer user creates a new ending for your story? Does it become a new work? Is it possible that this new work could be copyrighted as a collaboration between yourself and the user? And remember how you used the faces of a pair of famous movie stars when you created Edward and Betty? Did you have the right to do that? Whose faces are they, anyway, the stars' or the re-creator's?

Clearly, copyright in the twenty-first century will be a minefield. Thus, for authors who fear being thrown out of work by the electronic publishing revolution, I have good news: there will be lots and lots of job opportunities in the field of copyright law. Although you will, of course, first have to get a law degree, I can guarantee no end of challenging cases, protracted litigation, and chances to write new law. The seven-league strides made by scientists and technologists in electronic information have left lawyers in their dust. If they don't catch up, the protection of intellectual property will be a shambles. It is already dangerously unstable.

Among other purposes, copyright law was designed to protect the creations generated by the minds of authors, at least for enough time so that they and their heirs may profit from its dissemination.

Until the 1960s, the device commonly used to reproduce those creations was the printing press. The printing press is a large, cumbersome, and expensive machine that is beyond the means of most people to own and operate, even if they were inclined to do so. But that is what you would have had to do if you wished to make a copy of a book or story instead of purchasing it in the marketplace. A pirate, such as a publisher in a foreign land that was not a signatory to various international copyright conventions, could profit from running off a lot of copies of someone's book, but it made no sense for private individuals to do so. Oh, there was the mimeograph, the poor man's version of the printing press, but it required you to retype the item you wanted to reproduce. If you actually wanted to copy a literary work or document, you had to take it to a photostat shop where it was photographed one page at a time. The resulting product was white type on a black background on shiny, stiff photographic paper. It was easier and cheaper just to go out and buy the book or magazine than to go to such enormous trouble. Either that or steal it from the library.

The advent of the photocopier changed all that, bringing the capability for private reproduction of literary work into every home. The first such machines, made by Xerox—I wish I'd saved mine as it will be a valuable collectible one day—were primitive variants on the photostat, using light-sensitive coated paper to reproduce a page placed over a lighted screen. Although it was too crude to run off reproductions of any quality, and too slow to run them off in any quantity, the machine did bring copiers into the home.

The rapid refinement of "xerography" created an industry of local photocopy shops that can run off infinite copies of literary works of a quality equal to that of the originals. Most customers did not realize there were laws protecting the works they brought to the copy shops, and if the operators of such shops were aware they might be violating copyright statutes, they certainly didn't take any measures to locate or compensate the copyright owners. They probably didn't think it was their responsibility. Publishers became more and more alarmed, however, as copy shops brazenly reproduced work that those publishers had licensed on an exclusive basis. Though they eventually succeeded in compelling the largest chain of copy shops to observe proper copyright clearance procedures, the ignoring of copyright law is still widespread in the copy shop industry.

I suppose it could be brought under control through more assiduous monitoring. But the copyright problems created by another technology, personal computers (PCs), make copy shop operators look like Talmudic scribes by comparison. This time, the perpetrators are you. If you own a computer, you may be breaking the law, perhaps flagrantly.

In a nutshell, the problem is that for a modest outlay of money, you can acquire the technological means to copy any image or text without permission of the creator or copyright owner. You may then alter it on your video display screen as if it were a work that you yourself had created. And you may then print, publish, broadcast, or otherwise disseminate it. And make money doing so.

Scanners, for instance, capture published text and transmit it digitally into the memory storage of your computer. Another invention, compact optical disks, enables you to edit, change, or otherwise manipulate that text. Other technologies exist for storing or generating pictorial material and for retouching it or blending it with other pictures into a composite, thus changing the meaning of the original. Advances in the compression of information on disks via lasers make it possible for you to stock your PC library with literature you did not get permission to copy, possibly making you a thief, and to make and sell copies of those works, possibly making you a pirate. You may transmit those works electronically across interstate and international telephone lines, possibly making you a larcenist.

Of course, we rebel against such characterizations. Why? Because the means to capture, store, and manipulate information electronically have become so easy for computer owners that it feels like a natural right, like the right to breathe air. And indeed, this sense of entitlement taps into another aspect of copyright law, the public's need for easy access to creative and intellectual works. Because the doctrine of "fair use" for educational and related purposes supports a degree of free access to otherwise protected texts, we feel few qualms about photocopying a copyrighted article, story, poem, or book excerpt at a copy shop, duplicating a movie on our home VCR, or taping a favorite tune and running off recordings for our friends.

Even those of us in the authoring, agenting, and publishing business who would howl if someone pirated our copyrighted text scarcely give a thought to the legal and moral implications of these deeds when we commit them ourselves. But many others have begun to think and talk about them, and to try to formulate rules and standards that reassert control over a body of statutes that grows more irrelevant with each day.

The heart of the problem is that, because of the difficulty of distinguishing between content and the modes of display, the media have become harder and harder to define. Are you stealing somebody's story by simply displaying it on the screen of your personal computer? Are you publishing that story by transmitting it over a computer network onto somebody else's screen? Do you become a co-author when you alter someone else's text?

The copyright law only confuses the issues further. A work of authorship is protected as long as it is "fixed" in a "tangible medium." A book is, of course, a tangible medium that is fixed on paper, but can we say the same about the image of a book on a computer monitor? And though the law states that a copyright owner has the exclusive right to "reproduce the work in copies," the law also makes it clear that displaying a work does not amount to reproducing it, even though it might well be said that the work is fixed in the program of your computer. In 1980, the Copyright Act was amended to make sure that we understand the difference, defining a computer program as "a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result." In other words, the medium is not the same as the message. Yet, the blurry line between the two is creating no end of vexations for those trying to apply old rules to unprecedented situations. This explains why legislation redefining copyright (as well as trademark) in the computer/Internet era has been stalled in Congress. And the explosive growth of the Internet combining a deluge of text with one-click copying and disseminating capabilities has made the problem absolutely nightmarish.

Private use of copyright information is one thing, but deliberate and methodical theft is another, and the impossibility of policing abuses has severely damaged the economic value of intellectual assets by as much $60 billion by some estimates. Illegal publication of books overseas, for instance, costs American publishers about $1 billion annually. Pirated videotapes of Hollywood films may be costing the movie industry as much as $6 billion a year. Because it is fruitless to go after individual users, particularly in light of allegations that some foreign perpetrators are protected by their governments, the burden of restriction has fallen on the manufacturers and distributors of hardware and software. This takes the form of antitheft devices built into computer hardware and antipiracy instructions programmed into software. The increased costs of such protection have been passed along to consumers.

The computer software industry has also called on patent law and trade secrecy statutes. The so-called shrink-wrap license treats software as a trade secret: the act of opening a package of software is supposed to legally commit you to maintaining the secrecy of the program. The literature that accompanies the package presumably binds you to a pledge not to "use, copy, modify, merge, translate, or transfer" the software without the express agreement of the manufacturer. These oaths are commonly ignored by most consumers and gleefully flouted by hackers.

Concerned observers have created organizations dedicated to addressing these issues and formulating new standards. New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (NYU/ITP), for instance, established a Division on Copyright and the New Technologies aimed at defining the problems and creating sensible and effective copyright policies that balance reward for creative work with the widest possible dissemination of these works.

Donna Demac, former director of the NYU/ITP division, wrote in its prospectus of her concern that we may soon be unable to differentiate between "impermissible clones and legitimate derivative works," and that "the issues of ownership and originality are pivotal to the future development and profitability of new services." But many, she warns, "believe the technology to be on the side of unbridled access."

A number of organizations are trying to address the concerns created by the new media, developing programs of research and education, producing archives in various media, and conducting workshops, seminars, and other forums for the airing of the issues, and bringing them to the attention of Congress, industry, schools, and other institutions. Hopefully, these efforts will result in a new set of standards that will restore our feet on firm ground in this exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening, new electronic world.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in This Business of Publishing: An Insider's View of Current Trends and Tactics Copyright © 1998 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

"A Privileged Childhood in a Halcyon Time"

In the 1930s, more than 3000 years after Moses led an enslaved Jewish population out of the land of Egypt, a small but thriving Sephardic Jewish community flourished in Cairo and Alexandria. Some settled there from the Middle East, others from Europe, particularly Spain and Portugal after the expulsion of the Jews in the 15th century.

They had become affluent and influential through finance and trade. Though devotedly clinging to their Sephardic customs and practices, by the middle of the 20th century they were well integrated into the public life of their host country, contributing to the common weal and even underwriting many significant civic works and public services. They did not flaunt their faith, indeed most of them thought of themselves as Egyptian citizens who also happened to be Jewish, not unlike German Jews in the early 1930s.

Indeed, the fates of the German and Egyptian Jews of that era are strikingly parallel. Reading Jean Naggar's recently published memoir, Sipping from the Nile, I thought of Lion Feuchtwanger's The Oppermanns, a wrenching tale of a well-to-do Berlin family of Jewish furniture merchants who in 1932 and '33 were subtly but inexorably sucked into the maelstrom of Nazi antisemitism until it ruined and destroyed them. Naggar's book is a series of snapshots -- literally, for it is illustrated with wonderful photos of her family and home -- of a robust and bountiful Jewish society just before, during, and after its destruction and the dispersion of its citizenry.

The author, born in 1937, was raised in a luxurious home built in Cairo by her grandfather. There she enjoyed a carefree, almost fairy-tale upbringing amidst a large, distinguished, prosperous and tightly knit clan. Sipping from the Nile lyrically evokes the sensual beauty of the place -- the shimmering sun-drenched atmosphere, the weight of Nile history and culture extending back to the dawn of civilization, the aromas and textures, colors and clamor of an exotic land. In this lush and magical milieu her family and other members of Cairo's and Alexandria's Sephardic enclaves were not merely tolerated but honored.

The young girl experienced what Sybil Steinberg described as "a privileged childhood in a halcyon time," pampered by loving parents, grandparents, "aunties" and servants. The splendors of an elegant mansion and well-tended gardens saturated her senses. She was sent off to the best schools, and to escape the withering heat of high summer her family traveled to luxurious watering spots in Europe. They surrounded themselves with influential men and women in politics, business and the arts. In short, she wanted for nothing. Her parents managed to shelter her from the conflagration consuming Europe so that it did not deeply penetrate her innocence and cheerful spirits, not even when it almost lapped up on Egypt's doorstep in the battle for North Africa. Reports of concentration camps and extermination of Jews circulated in her home, yet she was insulated from the worst news of horror and atrocity.

But grand forces were at play in this part of the world, and in time they pressed ever harder on the day to day life of her family and neighbors. The creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1948 and the military triumph of the newly formed state of Israel over the Arab League (including Egypt) isolated the Jewish residents of Cairo and Alexandria, and their continued presence was a knuckle rubbed in the eyes of their neighbors. Yet they might have survived this setback had not a second and this time fatal blow made life in Egypt intolerable. Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, riding a wave of anticolonial fury, nationalized the Suez Canal, unleashing a frenzy of rage against the Jews who had lived in peace with their neighbors for hundreds of years.

Naggar's account of her family's hasty and perilous escape and subsequent exile from their homeland is almost unbearably poignant. Unlike their forefathers whose Exodus was assisted by wonders and miracles -- the mighty hand and outstretched arm of God, as the Bible declares -- the author's family escaped by its wits, assisted by the good will built up with servants and neighbors. But that is small consolation: an ancient and vibrant community of some 40,000 was all but obliterated.

The family's spirits were not, however. Naggar writes,

My father never allowed his discouragement to surface. It ate at his health, but left his spirit undamaged. His family had owned and managed the largest private investment bank in Egypt. In five generations the Mosseri [the author's paternal] family had owned and managed the largest private investment bank in Egypt. In five generations the Mosseri family had built a considerable fortune, had achieved dizzying heights of ease and recognition, and had become woven into the financial, social and political fabric of the country that now disenfranchised him and claimed all that was his. My father internalized the wrenching dispossession and hid the frayed ends of the rupture from view as he set about reinventing himself and wresting a future for his wife and children. He had done it before as a very young man when fate had claimed the lives of his brother and father, and he would rise to this new challenge even as he faced middle age. My mother, too, plunged into the intricacies of loss and displacement without dwelling on her losses. She looked to the future with optimism and energy. As long as we were all safe, she could learn what was needed, and she could and did make do with what she had. Tangled and enmeshed in their own challenges and preoccupations, my parents were unwilling to recognize the extent of my distress. They deal with my pain in the only way they could, by attempting to ignore its existence as they struggled to build a new life for all of us.

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And now for a personal postscript. Jean Naggar, a leading literary agent, has been a close colleague of mine for many years, and she and her husband Serge (who occupies a warm and wonderful place in her memoir) have dined with my wife and me on a number of occasions. Yet, until I read her book, I knew absolutely nothing of her remarkable upbringing or the extraordinary world she has depicted so beautifully and tenderly. I was completely astonished by these revelations and have to wonder how one can know another person professionally without so much as a clue about her personal history. Which leads me to reflect, how many so-called close acquaintances do we know whom we actually do not know at all?

When I learned she had published a book I purchased a copy from Amazon.com and consumed it in two days during jury duty while waiting to be empaneled. The more I read the more I hoped I would not be wrenched from my growing absorption in the bygone world of Jean's youth.

It is important to state that I have written this review unsolicited and unknown to her, so that I can truthfully tell you that hers is one of most stirring and affecting memoirs I have read in years.

Richard Curtis

Marco Vassi - An Appreciation

Were the Sixties put on earth so that Marco Vassi could happen? Or was Marco Vassi put on earth so that the Sixties could happen? To read his classic works of erotic fiction and his masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, The Stoned Apocalypse, is to realize that the man and the era were created out of the same fire and primordial elements. It is not, however, enough to say that Marco Vassi was a child of his age. It could just as accurately be said that the age was Marco Vassi’s fantasy, a fantasy so intense and compelling that it is impossible to read any of his books in one sitting: one must either jump into a cold shower, relieve oneself sexually, or go for a long contemplative walk to reflect on the profundity of his insights into human behavior.

Vassi had done many things before he became a writer, but writing was not one of them except for some translations from Chinese and critiques of manuscripts submitted to a literary agency where he was employed for a few years. He had also tried numerous identities on for size as he acted out and lived out the experiences that were to pour from his mind like water raging over the spillway of a dam. When in the late 1960’s “Fred” Vassi announced that he was embarking on a journey, his friends knew that it was not to a place but to a state of mind.

The state of mind was what came to be known as The Sixties, and anyone seeking to live in that state must enter it through the vision of the author of these works. In cartographic terms it was a journey from the East Coast to California, a trip that resonates with meaning for every student of The American Experience. Speaking metaphorically, however, it was a trip into the heart of life, love, laughter, horror, and sweet pain. Fred Vassi came back Marco Vassi, having recreated himself in the name of the intrepid voyager to the ends of the known world hundreds of years ago.

Heart fecund with all that had happened to him, he started writing the work that was eventually to become The Stoned Apocalypse, a book that captured in coruscating words what others of his generation were capturing so brilliantly in music.

With no source of regular income he tried his hand at what were then popularly known as "sex novels", a genre of tame pornography that pandered to the fantasies of repressed males still mired in postwar inhibition. With the wide-eyed innocence and self-deprecating humor that characterized every venture he undertook, he showed them to me, his friend and a fledgling literary agent. He merely hoped to raise a few dollars with them. I told him that they were the most incredibly arousing works of erotic literature since Henry Miller, and arranged for them to be brought out by Olympia Press, Miller’s publisher. Critics and reviewers confirmed my assessment. What distinguished his books from the rest of the pack was the application of Vassi’s intelligence. He knew that the mind is the most erotic organ of all. He termed this fusion of mind and sex organs “Metasex.”

For Marco Vassi, the liberation of sexual emotions, paralleling the liberation of so many others in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, promised a new age of beauty, love, and honesty, and he lived his vision to the hilt - quite literally. For a long while it seemed to him impossible that this vision did not rest on the bedrock of reality.

But, in the words of Robert Frost, nothing gold can stay. The bloody hand of Vietnam and the corrupt fist of the Nixon presidency crushed the fragile beauty of the flower generation. The unbridled commercialism that became the 1980’s captured and exploited the butterflies of Woodstock, enriching half of them and killing the other half with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Finally, the horror of a new scourge, AIDS, visited death upon the bodies of those who had dreamed of eternal love, irresponsible fun, and self-realization. It was then that Marco Vassi awoke from his dream of The Sixties. When he did, the virus had entered his blood. The first malady of any consequence to come along - in this case pneumonia - conquered his defenseless immune system and made short work of him.

Marco Vassi’s body died, but not the body of his work, which lives again in E-Reads editions. Like a rainbow over a bleak landscape, his dream of The Sixties shimmers above the depressing, sordid, and tragic decades that succeeded his. And ultimately, it triumphs over them.

- Richard Curtis