booklab

Following the controversy around the Google Settlement and European publishers’ and author (and collecting) societies, one could assume to witness a battle between a bunch of European Jedi knights against that Dark Vader from Mountain View, California. From a more detached reader’s point of view, things are clearly more complex.

While Google chose to digitize works from libraries at a massive scale since 2004, European representatives of copyright holders call on lawyers and legislators to fight the US settlement between the industry giant and stakeholders such as author and publishing representatives in a stand off that, in Germany or Austria in particular, has taken on the forms of cultural wars.

If things were so simple though.

A good moment of research in the database of Europeana, the European digital library network opposing Google, generates rather puzzling results.

First of all, pictures by far outnumber texts. Take Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955), the German Nobel laureate of 1929. We find 152 pictures and 45 text files, out of which only 10 are works by Thomas Mann. 9 of those are in Hungarian, 1 in Greek which can’t be opened. The Hungarian files include major works of Mann in full text, such as the Tonio Kröger, published initially in German in 1903.

The digital collection of modern classics of the Hungarian ‘Széchényi‘ National Library is impressive indeed. It includes such master pieces as the collected short stories of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, or the novel  “La Peste” by French Nobel laureate Albert Camus, all in Hungarian translation.

A copyright note to the digital collection, identifying the “Hungarian Electronic Library” MEK as the “administrator” of the public site, indicates:

„The copyright and other privileges are owned by the author/owner of the document (if he/she is known). If the author or owner expressly specifies conditions regarding the distribution and usage somewhere in this text, then those terms overrule the limitations stated below. Furthermore he or she is responsible for that too, that the distribution of this document in electronic form doesn’t hurt some other person authorship rights.”

And it furthermore allows a stunning set of free usages of its pages , clearly disregarding any copyright restrictions on the original works which it puts on display in Hungarian translation (for which, we hope at least, they have acquired the digital rights):

„This document can be freely copied and distributed, but you can use it only for personal purposes and non-commercial applications, without modifying it, and with proper citation to the original source.”

Another good example is French modern classic Paul Valéry, whose digitization by Google from US library copies was one of the starting points for the rage of France against the Anglo-dominated cultural effort of bringing books onto the Internet in the first place (with Europeana being one of the most direct results of the case).

Looking up texts by Paul Valéry (1871 - 1945) in Europeana results in 10 links to digital texts, none in French, and most from the Slovenian National and University Library of Ljubljana, including “The Crisis of the Mind”, a key text of Valéry’s. The two letters - “Kriza duha” in Slovenian - have been published initially in 1919 in English by Athenaeum in London, and then reproduced, in French in August of the same year, in “La Nouvelle Revue Francaise”.

As the Slovenian National Library provides no clues as to the printed sources (aside from a bland “From the collections of Variteté A.D.”), nor the translator nor the copyright, I found those details instead on the original publication of Valéry’s letters with another digital version , put up onto the web by a Massachusetts based organization, “The History Guide“,  which aims at giving students and teachers good content to “revolutionizing education in the spirit of socratic wisdom” and issuing, as it goes, its own ‘creative commons’ kind of conditions of usage with its site.

In fact, this is not the only online ressource for Valéry’s seminal pamphlet. The Université du Québec à Chicoutimi is so proud of its digital (French) version of “La crise de l’esprit” that it not only places it in a nice layout, but even adds the name and Email address of the person who did the digital version so nicely, Pierre Palpant. Thank you very much for your help indeed!

In return, “La crise de l’esprit” cannot be retrieved from Europeana, or its source, “Gallica“, the pride of “La Bibliothèque nationale de France”, BnF, for copyright reasons.

As for Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger”, I can find it full text at Scribd, a generally ‘legal’ portal, yet with lots of copyrighted, not so kosher reading stuff uploaded by and for students as well, and - my favorite finding by far - anpther copy at the most popular Italian dating site, “Amore Infinito“, in a bi-lingual version as a translation exercise and promo sample for its translator Heinrich F. Fleck who even claims a copyright for his translation, and refers to “casa Fisher” (recte Frankfurt based Holtzbrinck daughter S. Fischer) for the original rights.

At Google books, I find most texts by Mann and Valéry with only their bibliographical data, yet no quotes, but an English collection of Valéry’s “Writings“, including some of his poems in French, in a still available edition of “New Directions”, the famous house of Ezra Pound, William Carlos William, or more recently, Robert Walser and Roberto Bolano.

“Tonio Kröger”, of course, is also available as an e-Book for legal download, for instance at Mobipocket at Euro 1,20.

It is all a big mess indeed.

This by far non-exhaustive research of only a few titles of two writers, a French and a German modern classic, neither one a bestseller for their rights holder, Holtzbrinck’s S. Fischer for Thomas Mann, and Gallimard for Paul Valéry, are good enough though to provide a glimpse on the many mirrors reflecting books and related copyrighted material (or, even more so, so called orphaned works with no obvious rights holder to ask for permissions) onto the web. For good reasons, I excluded any notorious piracy sites in this research.

As a reader, I have serious doubts that at this stage, a good solution for me can evolve out of a legal battle between author or publisher organizations, and the likes of Google. And yet, of course, I want rights to be respected, and writers and others who are adding value to be paid.

It certainly must not be rewarded that one actor, in this case Google, decided to move first forcefully, and than, reluctantly, may comply to questions asked later. And I share the deep skepticism towards Google’s growing clout on the “world text mass” (”Welttextmasse“), the wonderful term coined by the ever good intuition of Peter Glaser. Furthermore it is not acceptable to simply apply US law to Europe.

This said, I must add that I don’t see either any reasonable perspective in expecting the same committees of stakeholder organizations who so far did not produce a lot more than angry calls for a silly “battle for our culture” may come up now with anything more meaningful or productive than over the past five years, since Google started its digitization of libraries on a grand scale.

Instead I consider some European version of a “fair use” formula a desirable perspective, and a European equivalent of the Google settlement is most likely the best and the most realistic way of developing a balanced system for handling copyrighted content on the Internet - with the creators AND the readers in mind. With no such settlement, all that we get is huge bills for lawyers, and little rewards (yet a huge chaos) for everybody else.

Interestingly, the outgoing Commissioner for the Information Society at the European Commission, Viviane Reding, has had the most clear words in this respect recently, as she said: “If we do not reform our European copyright rules on orphan works and libraries swiftly, digitisation and the development of attractive content offers will not take place in Europe, but on the other side of the Atlantic.”

As a footnote, I want to add that even if one doesn’t buy into the argument of Mrs Reding’s statement (which I consider as highly appropriate though), it is to be noted that she at least speaks about that process in a perspective for the future  - while most self appointed defenders of the endangered book culture speak of it only in the past tense.

The Jedi knights and Dark Vader are certainly great fun in a movie, or a novel. But they do not provide a valid blueprint for what needs to be done for us readers, or for authors or publishers.

Deutsche Fassung hier.

At the Frankfurt Book fair, I was amazed that a pretty much technical panel debate could draw a crowd of some 100 people for almost an hour.

I had the pleasure to host the talk with UK consultant Mark Bide, Piero Atanasio of the Italian Association of Publishers, and Simon Juden of the British Publishers’ Association about some pretty dry outlooks into the digital future. Everyone agreed on 2 things:

1. There is a lot of change ahead (not a surprise)

2. Things may be much less controversial than expected, because much of the hassle could be sorted out by technical innovations, instead of lawyers and litigation.

Today, various news wires bring the confirmation that the legal showdown between Google and the US publishers’ and authors organizations has been avoided and replaced by an out of court settlement (here is the release of AAP), opening doors, libraries and screens for tons of digital books online, and certainly encouraging Google to push even stronger in its digitization strategy.

A few days ago, I read - as it had been expected since one year - that Random House has signed an agreement with Google book search for all their  English language books.

In the meantime, all the hype about gadgets seems to cool off quite a bit as no release date for Amazon’s Kindle in Europe has been given in Frankfurt. No relevant Kindle 2.0 announcement has been made. Sony Reader is not available in many places in time for Christmas.

So I feel pretty much confirmed in my expectation that digital change is ahead, yet it is about access and reading, and it is much less about little plastic boxes of any kind.

Within only a few weeks, I came across all sorts of news refering to big publishing conglomerates and small indiependent houses who launch or announced  new approaches to putting books onto the internet. And at the same time, a new debate about eventual business models has started - anywhere between giving away all the stuff for free to charging for the download of a page or a chapter. This was not only triggered by the launch of new digital readers like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. It shows that there are a lot of people and companies out there thinking at and planning for perspectives of the book in a digital and connected world.

I certainly will comment on this in future posts, but in a first step, I thought that mapping those debates and announcements may be more useful and valuable. I have written a first overview, in German, in my column “Virtualienmarkt” at the Berlin based Perlentaucher. But here you can look at the ‘tool box’ with quotes and links to the main findings I covered, with only a minimum of comments

US Trade Wholesale Electronic Book Sales

Statistics: Here is a table with ebook sales in trade in the US. 

Examples of new ebook and digital book announcements and reports from recent weeks with quotes and links:   HarperCollins to put books online free (11.02.08 The Bookseller) “HarperCollins Publishers US is to offer free electronic editions of some of its books on its website, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine, reports the New York Times. (Coelho blog) The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”  Top authors to go digital with ebooks (The Sunday Times) “Random House and Hachette, which together control just over 30% of the British book market, are to offer downloadable versions of titles by authors ranging from Delia Smith to Ian McEwan and Michael Parkinson. Every other major publisher is drawing up plans to follow suit, pitching the books at just below the price of a hardback. The publishers have made the move to ebooks to follow the launch of two rival devices due to come on sale in Britain over the next few months – Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle. (…) In America, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle have been on sale since last autumn and about 90,000 titles are now available on them. (…) Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan, unveiled a digital “concept store”.Publishers  Lunch“Perhaps the most interesting launch is the one without a press release at all so far: Tor Books is accepting e-mail sign-ups for a program that promises “free digital books from bestselling and award-winning SF and fantasy authors…. Once you register, you’ll receive our newsletter and a link to download a digital book. And you’ll receive a link to another new book every week.” The first week’s free book is Mistborn, by rising fantasy star Brandon Sanderson. Next week’s will be Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, 2006’s winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Over the next several weeks, other books still.” Random to sell chapters online11.02.08 The Bookseller “Random House US is to begin selling the individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand for bite-size portions of digital texts, reports the Wall Street Journal.The publishing group’s experiment appears to be the first time a major consumer publisher has offered a title on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It will sell the six chapters and epilogue of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each.The move comes, says the WJS, at a time when retailers and publishers are looking for clues into how readers want to access digital content.”Publishers Weekly“In the Random test, Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, published in hardcover in January 2007, is being made available in six chapters and an epilogue—the content bunches are priced individually at $2.99 each—at www.randomhouse.com/madetostick. Consumers who buy a chapter will receive an e-mail with a link for downloading the purchased file, which cannot be shared electronically. Avideh Bashirrad, deputy director of marketing for RHPG, said the company chose Stick because each chapter contains standalone lessons. Matt Shatz, Random’s v-p, digital, said the experiment is intended “to gauge the demand for short form electronic content.” Several publishers, mostly in the travel and computer fields, have offered chapters for sale, with mixed results.” Publishers Weekly, 2/11/2008 Random House drops audio DRM 25.02.08 The Bookseller“Random House Audio — a division of Bertelsmann, one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world — has announced that it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers. According to blog site BoingBoing Random House noted that they’ve been running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those DRM-free editions; rather, they’ve come from DRM’ed editions that were cracked, and from ripped CDs.”   Brockhaus stops printed edition and moves online instead“The German encyclopedia publisher Brockhaus said it would place its reference works on the Internet to offset falling revenues. Unlike popular reference work Wikipedia, it will be ad-sponsored and professionally edited.”Deutsche Welle   Brockhaus ceases publication of its paper edition“This news represents a watershed,” was Manfred Schneider’s comment on the announcement by the traditional Brockhaus publishing house that it would be making its encyclopaedia available on-line from 15 April on a free, advertising-financed website rather than publishing a new paper edition of the thirty-one volume work. “A review of the history of Brockhaus forces contemporary book-lovers to draw the wistful conclusion that this move marks not only a change in publishing strategy but also the end of an era. “Frankfurter Rundschau quoted in Courier International  In France, the popular encyclopedia “Quid” stops printed edition“The 2008 edition of Quid, France’s favourite encyclopaedia, has been cancelled by its publisher for lack of interest. The annual sales of the 2,000-page tome, which reached more than 400,000 in the mid-1990s, collapsed to just over 100,000 last year. The book’s publisher, Robert Laffont, says the whole concept of the print encyclopedia can no longer compete with the free information available on the internet.”The Independent 19 Feb 2008 The new debate on how to prepare and serve a free lunchKevin Kelly: Better Than Free “When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?”“The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download.“ In: EdgeChris Andersen: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business “It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.”In: Wired Chris Andersen on his Blog The Long Tail“I plan to make as many versions as possible of FREE, well,  free, starting with the MP3 audiobook and possibly including a sponsored physical book. Is this going to backfire, given that I’m already on the well-known side of the equation?Well, if all I wanted to do was sell books, it might (although I doubt it, given the usability benefits of the physical form of a serious book. After all, giving away a pdf version of his book on net policy and economics helped Yochai Benkler sell more hardcover books than he would have otherwise. 500+ pages is a lot to print out, to say nothing of reading on-screen).”In Andersen’s blog The Long TailOprah e-freebie now Amazon’s 3rd best p-seller “Can you boost p-book sales by giving away e-copies of the same titles for free? Oprah Winfrey’s book club last week allowed free downloads of the book in Kindle and PDF formats and perhaps others, for 33 hours. It drew more than a million downloads“David Rothman in his blog in Publishers Weekly  February 19, 2008  “Free is more complicated than you think” by Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert “I spend about a third of my workday blogging. Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases my income by 1%. I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it.  A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put the entire text of my book, God’s Debris, on the Internet for free, after sales of the hard copy and its sequel, The Religion War slowed. My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops.”Scott Adams in a column in The Wall Street Journal 1 Nov 2007   Tim O’Reilly picked up on Adams’ discovery of the ambivalence of freebies and did the math more in detail, with figures from his own book publishing business. He realized what fabulous numbers of page views and ad clicks would be required to come up with the revenues he had by selling printed books in traditional ways. As quoted by one listener to his presentation: “Assume (hypothetical but probably close to his real business) that he sells 200K books/month @ $20 = $4M/month = $48M/year. Average book is 446 pages, which is equivalent to 90M page views per month. At a $1 CPM (=Cost per thousand impressions), that’s $90K/month. At a $20 CPM, it’s $1.8M — roughly half the size of the book business.”Tim O’Reilly’s conclusion was that at first he had considered advertising to provide a solution for creating revenues out of online publishing („advertising works and we’re just not good at it”), before he flatly understood: “We need to stop thinking of advertising as a model.”  Tim O’Reilly: “Free is more complicated than you think” New publishing models: Case studies and presentation from this year’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing onferenceProcedings  of the conference in 2008Ben Vershow, Institute of the Future of the Book: “Books as Conversation”If the book is digital, however, and resides on a network, new possibilities begin to open up. The page margin can become a public space. Authors and readers can interact in close to real time. An entire classroom can operate inside a single text. Books can become conversations.   And let me remind you of sci/fi writer Cory Doctorow who was probably the first writer who understood how to use free online publishing of his writing  (and the usage of ‘creative commons’ licences) to establish his publishing success through a web community of fans.

Apologies for being a lazy blogger, but here I can report on a curious and multi facetted battle in German print culture.

A few weeks before Jonathan Littell’s originally French novel “Les Bienveillantes” (”The Kindly Ones”) is due for release in German translation at Berlin Verlag, the prestiguous conservative broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) starts not only to run daily small doses of the book in their culture pages. They also started, attatched to the serialisation, a brand new “Reading Room” with online comments about the book that has a considerable potential for controversy particularly in Germany as it is the (fictitious) autobiography of Max von Aue, an SS nazi officer involved in the Holocaust.

To avoid the risk of uncontrolled or just plain stupid comments, the editors of the newspaper opted for an original version of a blog - by inviting 8 experts to write about Littell, all of them male, mostly professors, and in their 60s.

What would seem only a bit odd, in the light of usual blogging culture, is even more remarkable as only a few weeks ago, FAZ, had launched a furious anti-blogging, anti-stupid-online-posting and anti-”swarm culture” campaign in its pages. It all started with FAZ’s co-publisher Frank Schirrmacher writing a particularly angry piece about a colleague’s unfortunate (and less than brilliant) video blog in the weekly “Die Zeit” on youth violence and the wave of hate posts that this blog had stirred up. (For a balanced summary, see the neutral Swiss NZZ)

For Schirrmacher, the reader’s comments were just the last evidence for how the “swarm”, meaning the reading audience let lose, was bringing about the end of (a) culture, (b) decency and how (c) “quality journalism” was the only force left to defend the holy grail of Western civilised debate.

As this was not enough, FAZ had another one of its staff writers, adding a last and truly final judgment about all that controversy, and the internet and its users with it. Under the headline of “Disgusting and Totalitarian” (yes!), Christian Geyer not only saw an entire “political culture in danger”, but chose to call those readers who had angrily posted their comments against the professional journalist’s op-ed furor “mob users”, and urged any responsible media to, in the future, make sure that such “dirt and garbage” is not published anymore.

With this elite version of blogging, as set up by the quality paper on behalf of the Littell novel, we are now shown how we can save our minds, namely by reading the erudite words of selected professors.

Oh, thank you, we had almost forgotten what had made the blogosphere such a thriving and fascinating space in the first place.

It is rare, at least in my observation, to see various pretty serious people - essayists, journalists of high quality newspapers, editors - really in rage to the point of denouncing all (presumed) adversaries squarely as ‘childish’, ‘anti-journalists’ and ‘filthy’, oh, and yes, ‘user generated content’ is called ‘loser generated content’ because alledgedly in websites such as delicio.us, only “3 percent of the posts” refer to  ”news that shape global events”, and the rest is about “making coffee in Japan and the quality of seats in airplanes”.

Since a few weeks, major newspapers in Germany seem to fight for their very survival (and, I must add, use more latin proverbs than normally in years), as they feel threatened by the “Web 0.0” (the double zero alluding to the popular shortcut for a toilet, in fact).

These are the facts and the background: A German court ruled that owners of a website (or blog) can be liable for all posted comments - which resulted in the prestiguous Sueddeutsche Zeitung to allow postings on their website only during office hours, meaning that readers can comment on articles only Monday through Friday between 8am and 7 pm. Freedom of expressions has clear limits: No night shifts or weekend hours.

In another - pretty much unexpected - ruling this morning, a civil case of Sueddeutsche and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) against the online news portal and aggregator Perlentaucher was rejected by the court of appeal in Frankfurt. Perlentaucher (for whom I write a ca. monthly column about culture, books and the digital world), among other things, produces summaries of the daily cultural pages and book reviews of major German newspapers for a newsletter and their website, and sells those pieces to an online bookstore - which infringes, according to Sueddeutsche and FAZ their copyright. The court turned the argument down, explaining that such summaries cannot be interdicted because anyone has the right to publish a summary of a work (e.g. a newspaper article), even with a commercial purpose, provided the summary has its own “creative substance”.

Now the interesting part of the controvery is, at least in my view, absolutely not about copyright, but about culture.  Only an argument about two contrary concepts of culture is good enough for all this fury.

The debate started in fact when in October, member of the publishing board of FAZ, Frank Schirrmacher, an icon of German conservative journalism, had argued “How the Internet Changes Man”, stating - this is already his follow up explanation of the original essay - why printed newspapers have a “purpose” in society as gatekeepers for reliable information and reading, hence are among the pillars of culture (as opposed to the pillows that couch potatoes and web surfers are sitting on, I suppose).

“The newspaper”, Schirrmacher argues, “lasts for at least 24 hours, and with its opinon pieces and reviews, it claims even to have a value for following generations.”

Now, this is an interesting point, as it says that durability, life time, is the measure for cultural value.

Two answers to this. First the Austrian version, which means to point to Karl Kraus, the 20th century critic and aggressive essayist against - newspapers, because of their sloppiness, bad language and shortsightedness (’only for 24 hours!’); by such, he became the harshest benchmark for quality journalism, including for the FAZ. Kraus would never ever have thought for a second of newspapers as a guarantee for cultural value, as opposed to books.

This is the other answer: We see in this stunning German controversy a carbon copy of all those pointless debates over centuries why - please fill in your newest media beast - photography, radio, TV, the internet, comic books threaten the book, culture, civilized life.

At once, we find newspapers among the pillars, not the pillows of culture. How come? Remember the odd word of ‘nothing is less valid than yesterday’s paper’!

The German controversy on culture reflects, of course, the dramatic aging of newspaper readers, the loss of revenues from classified ads, and the competition from all those new actors who are more successful at the emerging online market place.

But the real offense comes from their younger readers whom the newspapers seem not to trust anymore. So they yell at them, in despair.

According to them, the web is  “also a medium that growingly makes not-reading or alsmost not reading possible” (Schirrmacher); those among the readers who post unfitting comments on the newspapers’ websites are “leisure activists with a little scum on their lips” (Sueddeutsche), or, in today’s FAZ: “Every serious blogger will change sides”.

So the argument points at a war - of the newspapers against a portion of their own audience. A civil war for the newsroom?

I guess not that much. It is the culture of the 19th century - where ‘culture’ equals a few knowledgeable, elder men (not women) educating the mass - against what? No, not some bland 21st century thing - but rather against the 18th century, that was much more experimental and laid the foundations of modern democracy, learning societies, peer review (Yes! Those interested readers giving their opinion on a piece, and the result is debate and, yes, often enough, squabble), yet turned from then small clubs and societies to the global mass sociteties of today, fragmented, volatile, dynamic as they are.

This points to a real and substantial cultural divide. A clash of cultures, not only in Germany. Interesting! Let’s see what’s going on next.

So today, more than 48 hours before the official release date, the New York Times publishes a first review of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - and guess what, aside from, of course, not revealing the end (which, also a matter of course, everyone interested could see already for a few days everywhere on the web as reveiled by cohorts of Harry ’spoilers’ who posted a photographed early bird copy of the book), was full of praise for the ingenuitity of Mrs. Rowling’s art of story telling:
“J. K. Rowling’s monumental, spellbinding epic, 10 years in the making, is deeply rooted in traditional literature and Hollywood sagas — from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to “Star Wars.” And true to its roots, it ends not with modernist, “Soprano”-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: a big-screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people’s fates.” And, if this is not enough, here the reviewer, MICHIKO KAKUTANI, goes on: This same magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.”

Wow!

By the fact that, sitting in Vienna, Austria, I am in no position to walk over to some New York book store and pick up the book way before official delivery, as the NYT seems to have done, I can only humbly hint at that magic that HP has brought to the book world. I wrote a small piece about this in Perlentaucher, in German, and these are the main thoughts:

For sure, HP will have changed the world of publishing and book retail like no single book before, but with pretty mixed results for various actors:

1. We learned over the past few weeks that studies on reading habits of youth point out that even kid who absorbed high level doses of HP won’t necessarily read other books as well;

2. While a few, like JK Rowling herself and her original publisher Bloomsbury (very deservedly, I think), wholesalers and some marketers earned a lot of money, but for many others it was more of a rollercoaster, or playing at a casino, with the highest risk due to sky rocketing fees for every right sold that could be attached to HP

3. Those mega marketing pipelines that have been build around HP for over 10 years are ready for more fuel now - and nobody will care, if that is to benefit books, or games, or whatever - so it is not necessarily a winning scheme for book lovers

4. Small indie book stores all over the place are likely not to get rich, due to discounts, or even, in countires with fixed book prices like Germany, Austria, France, a first tsunami comes with the (flexibly priced) original English language edition, which will be a hard reality check to pricing discipline everywhere, bringing up my next point;

5. English original editions have learned to fly across language barriers as if they traveled on broomsticks, which is good, I guess, as it show’s people’s ability and readiness to go for what they want, and depend less on those established content channels, but which brings ever more competition to the established, if you wish ‘old fashioned’ book trade;

6. From now on, even if that is not entirely new either, there will be ‘books’ - and those other books, meaning, those rocketing to the sky, on a global scale, and those many many other titesls that travels slowly, to limited readerships, and honestly, we shouldn’t expect that those completely diverging entities can live under one and the same economical parameters, meaning: I am deeply sceptical if for these many books (and their publishers, and the related enthousiastic book sellers) one will expect to earn money.

I was really puzzled when I realized the amount of interest (and feedback) I had the other day with a piece written for Publishers Weekly about how autobiographies are classified in different ways in the AngloSaxon world, and in the rest of Europe:

While Americans and Brits expect writers of autobiographies to say the truth, somehow, in France, Spain or Germany, those same books are routinely classified as fiction.

Think of German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass’s autobiography “Peeling the Onion”, which was released last week and promoted with a talk between Grass and Norman Mailer in New York, a book reveiling the fact of Grass, the moralist, having been a member of Nazi Waffen SS as a youth, which of course was listed as fiction in Germany last year. Or even more stunning, John Grisham’s The Invisible Man, an essay against the death penalty - again read as a book of fiction in Europe due to the author being a writer of novels primarily. 

One of my interview partners for the piece, Bernhard Fetz, a Vienna-based researcher with the Austrian National Library, and a specialist in the genre, pointed to a pretty  complex set of traditions beneath the odd differences in classification, as he told me:

“The differences of perception go back to antagonistic traditions in philosophy and cultural history: While Germany, or France, have a mostly idealist tradition in culture, Britain, and hence the U.S., have always had a more pragmatic approach. Essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Goethe, always combined factual accounts with personal intuitions and selfreflections of the author, giving autobiographies also a political angle by defining a life story as exemplary for a nation. The Anglo-Saxon tradition was instead much more and much earlier influenced by science, and therefore supposed to rely on facts, and less on intentions, Fetz says.

Amazing, I think, and you understand why reading the same book in different cultural surroundings may provide a very different read (and understanding) indeed!

I don’t need to tell you more than the fact that I lost almost my entire virtual capital on the betting scheme for the Ingeborg Bachman award (see previous post), while the crowd at large narrowed their focus in an impressive curve steadily onto the winner Lutz Seiler (hence giving up in continuous, yet opportunistic - oh yes! - moves on its initial hero who was PeterLicht, a writer performer who wouldn’t reveil his face to cameras).

In fact we know about the impressive likelyhood of such crowds to demonstrate their collective wisdome since the mid / late 1990s when similar betting schemes proved to be usually more successful e.g. in predicting the outcome of general elections.

But what does that mean to all of us experts, in one field or another! Hélas, aren’t we happy to be asked for our insights every once in a while nevertheless? Lucky us.

Over dinner - or, if you prefer, during the past hour or so - I lost roughly 10 percent of my literary capital.

Initially, I had 5000 $, provided by Riesenmaschine, a Berlin based fancy blog, to bet on the outcome of what is still probably the strangest annual event in literature in the German speaking sphere, the Ingeborg Bachmann Reading and Award: One and a half dozen of mostly young writers (young= 1 to 3 books published, on average) read an unpublished chapter before a jury of literary critics (and these critics have also nominated the authors - so they also compete, sort of) and an interested audience in arena like setting. The reading authors are - sometimes pretty harshly - reviewed live, in front of the audience and TV cameras (yes, the entire event is broadcast live by a public culture channel in Austria and Germany), and at the end, one is declared the year’s Ingeborg Bachmann winner, and a few more get additional awards and recognition - or, if they crash, they can nosedive their career.

The event is the most hated literary encounter for over 2 decades now, and still alive, and everybody who wants to be somebody in literature, goes there, ready to get badly hurt, or, like in a lotery, become the unlikely winner against all the odds.

This year’s novelty is that you can bet on the winner online, in some stock market mimikry scheme: You get 5000 virtual bucks, can invest and divest and have fun at not really any real risk.

The betting scheme is provided by Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, or ZIA, basically an agency full of nerdy, funny, yet very professional Berlin based text workers (from PR texts to - yes, you bet - Bachmann award winning literature, as their Kathrin Passig won last year’s award with prose just perfectly targeted at that jury so that everyone was startled, both by the text and by the cold blood of its author who deliberately calculated her shots - at the jury, the audience, the entire set up).

The ZIA - which mocks, of course, CIA - also earlier proved its strong understanding of the internet, by organizing virtual audiences to the effect of lobbying successfully for their favourite participant for the ‘Audience Award’ for three years in a row!

Well, and this year, as all awards had been taken home already in the past by ZIA, they opted for calibrating the entire thing with their virtual Bachmann stock exchange.

Ever curious, I took my 5000 ZIA $ and will try my luck / skill / insight, or whatever - and keep you posted till the end which is scheduled for July 1st. Stay with us and see if I win.

Book markets today have a reputation of being slow, flat, little exciting, except for those breath taking crime novels that top so many bestseller lists around the globe.

Yet there is this 3 bn dollar niche market that draw little attent, if not by a few international sales people from wholesalers or large corporations.

I speak of the expanding market of English language books that are exported from the UK and US into the rest of the world.

In 2005, the US exported books for 981 million USD, and the UK books for another 2246 USD (and these numbers already exclude exports from the US into Canada and the UK, and from the UK into the US, Ireland and Australia - otherwise it is a staggering 5 bn market niche). And these export markets show significant growth in some places.

Put together, the 3 bn $ cake grew by 20 percent over a decade, from 2461 m $ in 1995 to 2975 in 2005 (all numbers according to the UK Dept. of Trade and Industry, and the US Trade Stats Express).

Those numbers get even more interesting, once we dig into details.

 Rule Britannia

First of all, we see that the UK is by far the stronger exporter than the US, and this is true for most target markets indeed.

Germany in 2005 imported 95 m Pound Sterling (or almost 200 m $) worth of British books as compared to less than 60 m Yankee books.

China bought books for 27 m $ from the UK as compared to 20 m $ from the US - and China is, for books just as well as for anything else, probably the most important destination in the near future. Imports from the UK grew from 1,3 m GBP (or some 2,5 m $) in 1995 pretty much continually to its level of today, while from the US side, it started in 1995 from more serious 6 m $, at a much  slower pace, to its current purchasing level.

One may think that this is all a bit like Harry Potter, that British wizzard and sorcerer, who conquered the world, starting at what was at least in the beginning, a rather obscure British boarding school. And yes, those HP books opened many doors, for instance when they hit the top of the German bestseller in 2000 - in English!

Well expect the details about Harry and the Global World of Books - and much more in the weeks to come on the booklab blog, as we prepare at BookExpo America for a Global Market Forum on June 1st, 2007, on exactly those questions, with 2 top expert panels and a lot of insight.

More to come to a blog near you…