More digital book projects (to be continued)

Publishers Weekly writes that the US children classic Dr. Seuss is going digital, thanks to a partnership between Dr. Seuss Enterprises and kidthing, a new content distribution platform. The website kidthing is to go online later this month.

Sometimes, too quick is too late. Publishers Lunch informed us only the day before expiration of the offer about a free download of Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children. The online site closed the freeby as of February 29 – but still adds to an emerging pattern: Putting up free stuff for only some limited period of time.

Also writers are getting interesting in the new digital movements – only to realize that publishers charge for downloadable books usually roughly as much as for printed books, yet don’t have to pay for all the storage, printing and delivery. This brings Kate Pullinger to write in the British Guardian which triggered some debate.

Writers can learn a lot from the Hollywood strike. We deserve a better deal from digital publishing.“

This is how the piece opens:

Writers of the world arise! It’s time to throw off the shackles of traditional publishing contracts and face a brand new digital future with a brand new set of priorities. Let’s copy or, should I say, learn from our brothers and sisters in Hollywood: don’t let the industry take our digital rights away! Give us our digital dues! In the shift from print to digital, writers are in danger of losing out big time.“ It will be interesting to see if all those fast written thrillers will be put on hold – and both publishers and us readers shivering.

And at the Leipziger Buchmesse (Leipzig book fair) of next week, there will be an open forum about new digital book communities in germany, with among the speakers Miriam Hofheinz (www.perry-rhodan.net), Janet Sunjic vom Hörspiellabel Lausch-Hörspiele (www.merlausch.de) und Jennifer Nikodem (www.lovelybooks.de).

More details about free eBooks on Tor Books

Co-Blogger Simon Owens told me more details about the Sci/fi publisher Tor Books and his new way of giving away fre eBooks. In his own blog „bloggasm„, he writes:

 „Two sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity said that it’s intended to be a “go-to site, a central community” for science fiction and fantasy fans. A few authors have already been approached to submit original short fiction to be published online. Tor is paying upwards of 25 cents per word for these stories and right now is only dealing with solicited authors.“

Thank you Simon.

EBooks, digital books, the future of books: An overview of current publishing experiments and strategy debates

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 downloadsDavid 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 ConversationIf 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.

About cultural loss through technology – a few 1000 years ago

The revolving debate about what culture may lose as books migrate from a shelf onto a screen – or if digitizing books is a good thing, or just plain vil – I was amused to come across this story related by Plato in Phaedrus 275 A:

„When the god Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: ‚it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory‘.“

This is only one example showing that as early as when writing took over from oral narratives, in the dawn of History, not everybody was happy and welcoming the new cultural technology.

A similar, critical statement about cultural change and innovation can be found in the Indian Mahabaratha:

„The sellers of the Vedas, the misreaders of the Vedas, the writers of the Vedas, all go on the path to hell.“

I found both quotes in this wonderful book: Nicholas Ostler. Empires of the word. A Language History of the World. Harper Perennial, London New York et al. 2005, p. 183.

Unwrap a book – digitally

Here you can find Paulo Coelho’s new megaseller „The Witch of Portobello“ – for free. Oh, and yes, it is entirely legal. Courtesy of Harper Collins, Coelho’s US publisher.

Why they give away Coelho’s new book digitally? In order to sell it on paper, of course. And Harper decided, as of today, to start putting books up online for free more or less systematically. With Coelho, this will be one book per month, in a read only, no printing, no saving locally version, yet of course with a direct ‚buy this book‘ link attached.

Harper Collins is, after all, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of News Corp, and he has a reputation of both not doing anything without thinking of the money he can make, and of having a pretty good nose for when is the moment to jump on a band wagon of innovation. Remind you that he had acquired MySpace, and thereby heavily boosted all of web 2.0

In an interview with the New York Times,  Harper’s top lady Jane Friedman called this kick off of serious experimenting (I guess this is what it is, after all): „It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book„.

This is an interesting concept, I think: Using digital to **open books**.  (I will discuss all the many implications of this in a special post here soon).

But as for today, take note of a number of co-inciding recent announcements, related or not: Simon & Schuster created the office of a Chief Digital Officer „for the full scope of the company’s activities in the digital realm.“ Random House meanwhile will start to sell „chapters“ of books online, starting with „six chapters and epilogue of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each“, according to the Wall Street Journal, and quoted by The Bookseller.

While I’m not sure if the price tag of $2.99 for a chapter is a sticky idea – I remember an earlier announcement by RH (or was it Amazon) of a bit more than a year ago of a penny a page – and sorry, I did not check now what was the correct quote.

But the strong news is this: Publishers – and for sure, rather sooner than later, online booksellers even more so – start to take the web seriously (and, oh, right, Amazon just acquired Audible, to sell bookish content truely online, and not from their brick ‚ mortar warehouses).

Add to all of this the sheer number of books that are somehow available digitally online – in all of those restricted forms, as ’snippets‘ with Google, in digitalisation projects – with many users craving to access them at once.

My point is: This is how the eBook market will take off for real, not through heavily rights managed closed boxes in the style of Amazon’s Kindle. Cost is not the main hurdle. It is that (a) why should I want to digitally buy a clumsy and bastard variant of a book reading device, and more importantly, (b) why would I allow anyone selling me that digital book to intrude into my ways of using that book, so that I can’t give it to my buddy, or do with my copy whatever else I want.

So, when publishers stop sitting on their digital books and start to experiment, put up stuff for free, cooperate with their writers, and their writers’s communities, when booksellers get serious about downloads of audio (and therefore need to consider if they will use RDM, or learn from the music industry and prefer high usability), and start to consider of all of this in integrated strategies (with some Chief Digital Someone), they may liberate forces that are really relevant.

More on this soon.

Blogging – the Elite Way

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.

The swarm and the fury: Newspapers battle against (not for) their audience in Germany.

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.

Writing in (and from) Croatia

Last week I had the pleasure to spend a few days in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Zagreb, Croatia, talking to publishers and writers on a trip with book people mostly from germany, to prepare (a) next year’s Leipzig book fair where Croatia is the guest of honour, and (b) next year’s brand new Vienna book fair BuchWien where I have the pleasure and duty to prepare for a Central Europe / Tranlsation / Cultural Diversity program.

Being pretty familiar with Zagreb for a long time, which looks a lot like my native town of Graz, I was struck at first by the massive monuments (I had just forgotten about them, but to be frank, they are very much similar in Graz – apologies 😉

Anyhow, the point is how a bit more than a decade after the wars of secession within collapsing Yugoslavia, Croatia seems ready (and ambitious) to become one more normal ’small‘ country and culture, yet it is still struggling to impose that normalty as opposed to the shadows of the past.

A major breakthrew, politically, was when former general Gotovina was seized for trial at the Hague tribunal as of last year, after long behind the scenes negociations – while oddly enough, at the beautiful Dalmatian coast, where Gotovina fans and nationalists are strongest, the tourist industry started to really take off.

I asked a publishers friend of mine about this oddity of political geography, and he shrugged, saying that he just does not know. Along the coast, where, aside from Dubrovnik and Split, little war fare had occured, people voted ’national‘ (just as in those provinces of Slavonia, where indeed Serb had committed the severest war crimes), while in former Krajna,  in ever disputed Istria, and, well, understandably, in urban Zagreb, most non-nationalist votes were cast.

One writer had become famous from Croatia recently, telling about the war in Bosnia, Miljenko Jergovic, but he does not appear in public anymore. Instead, I met Zoran Feric, who has been translated recently, in a beautiful club run by a couple of women (booksa).

We’ve also been introduced to several of the local literary publishers, to Nenad Popovic of Durieux, an old friend indeed – who, walking us to Booksa club, had shown us the villa of former icon Tilla Durieux after whom he had named his publishing company (in the 1990s, when people just had forgotten that she had been with partizan resistance – what an absurd twist and irony in those Tudjman years of Croatia), or Fraktura.

Earlier that day, we had walked into a really great and huge book store, Profil – and almost, being a group of almost 20, driven out all regular customers – with a really substantial foreign language section (I still can’t manage my picture upload button, but promise to show a few photographs of all this soon).

Oh, and we had lunch and dinner with 2 rivalry publishers‘ associations, learning from György Dalos, our Hungarian guide to Croation book country, that in Hungary they had successfully founded 8 (!) competing book associations by now (and I admit, such things are among my favourites), so I promise that I will tell you more about all of this soon, and bring pictures for testimony as well.

Book Publishing in China – A Paradox World to Explore

There are 577 publishing companies in China – versus several thousand in Germany alone – and all are owned by the state, sort of.

There are more than twice as many new titles published per year – 233,000 against 90,000 in Germany -, yet the Chinese book market  is only worth half of the German. But at a retail price of 1 Euro per book in China against more than 10 in Germany, one can start to marvel at the magnitude that the Chinese book market does represent.

We had a terrific seminar on these issues last week, in Vienna, Austria, and in Berlin, Germany, with Ou Hong of the trade magazine China Publishing Today, and Huang Jiwei of the primarily children’s book publishing company Jie Li (#27 among all PR Chinese publishing ventures) who introduced us to how things work in PR China.

The amazing paradox is that on the one hand, publishing is still supposed to be under state control. Yet at the same time, this is an amazingly expansive industry, and, second surprise, books and reading over there are very much targeted at young audiences in their 20ies – as opposed to book reading as a typically 50+ past time in Europe.

This is reflected by any bestseller list, such as the fairly reliable one researched by Nielsen affiliated OpenBook which is published on a monthly basis by Publishing Today (and recently, we proudly disseminate this list to major book trade magazines worldwide).  

We have a fair amount of pop star like writers in China today, like Han Han, Anni Baobei, or Guo Jingming, all in their early twenties, who cater to a likewise audience, obviously dwelling on their agenda of how to find guidance and meaning in a turbulent society full of change, and with few secured guidelines (with old fashioned Chinese literary critics asking desperately if those young folk can be seasoned enough to understand the depth of art and life).

On the other hand, we see how books and writers a growing into huge cornerstones for orientation and values in a society turned upside down every other month.

A few simple examples: Bill Bryson’s huge narrative across millenia of Earth and Human history, „A Short History of Nearly Everything“, has been turned into a must read for ambituous youngsters, and successfully so, because this is what „young people should learn to know anyway“. Oops, pardon me! This is not only a flatly ambitious statement. Anyone with some experience in branding and marketing will marvel at the daring approach of just turning around some global success story for free re-formating!

I also liked how deliberately global and home grown success stories have been shown at our workshops.

There is, for young readers up to ca. 12 years, the wild ‚we’re all happy‘ books of Yang Hongying, about a kid with a toy designer papa and a super nanny all-is-good mom. Mrs. Yang traveled to 90 cities in 4 years, selling 12 million books domestically, plus rights to the US and to France.

More surprisingly, almost the same happened to Thomas Brezina, of Austria, except for the travelling, who authored the „Super Tiger Team“ series, selling a few hundred thousand books in Austria and, to a lesser degree, in Germany. But now, 6 out of the current top 10 in children’s fiction are of his books – representing many millions in sales, and solidly more than J.K. Rowling with her Harry Potter series indeed!

The interesting point is this: Reading books in China is obviously closely linked to being upwardly ambitious and young in PR China, and everyone, authors, publishers, of course foreigners, but also the domestic authorities are heavily experimenting on how to make these things happen most effectively.

Any major web 2.0 website, most of which are wildly popular in China, display prominently ‚book‘ or ‚reading‘ channels, displaying often entire books, sometimes for free, sometimes at a fee.

 I came apon the novel of a  „Zhi Feng 1133“ at sina who had clearly drawn over a million readers as of last week with a still unprinted story.

And of course it is at little risk to early warn about one of the top worldwide fiction discoveries in 2008 by quoting „Wolf Totem“ by Jiang Rong, who had spent 11 years in Mongolia in the Cultural Revolution, sentenced to be re-educated, but in fact studying wolves and how they recognize and respect rank, and order, when hunting as a pack – which made him develop a theory of „wolf stratagems“ – obviously a set of rules of behaviours and success that applies not only to China, but also to the rest of us. His book, „Wolf Totem“, sold for translations into many languages, will be in a book store near you at some time next year, with rumours of Peter Jackson („Lord of the Rings“) preparing to turn the unique story into a movie.

What else should I add? Let’s go China, if you want to check it out.

More on these pages and at my www.wischenbart.com/china every once in a while over the next year.

Blogging slowly, as centuries go by, about the really messy library

Somehow I have difficulties with the hurry of blogging. I was at this wonderful daylong workshop about the „Really Modern Library„, organized by Bob Stein and Ben Vershbow of the Institute of the Future of the Book at the London School of Economics. That was more than 2 weeks ago. Is this still worth blogging?

In the meantime, I had to work (for my income), fight with my son (over adolescence issues), and see how my single and working life both go on.

In the New Yorker, I read a knowledgable and fabulously instructive piece by Anthony Grafton about the digitization of libraries, reviewing all the current efforts to digitize libraries and other knowledge stuff, concluding dryly: „A record of all history appears even more distant.“

 I suppose there has been some misunderstanding of Gafton’s point, as he is not really anti-tech, but he pragmatically shares a common sense with a certain type of Science Fiction novels and movies where, despite all of the splendid future achievements, there is always a lot just messy, or human.

Personally, I like this. I always feel kind of appalled by the more shiny anticipations, like „organizing all the information of the universe“, or such matter. Sure, it is marvellous that I can literally have much of my relevant information at my fingertips by now, and this is how I work on a daily basis. Frankly, it is just gorgeous that I can assemble my personal belongings plus partners and friends across several continents, plus pretty much effectively short cut censorship (well, not entirely, but much better then as it was under the old Iron Curtain), when these partners happen to include a few more odd destinations – and all this by the power of digital integration.

But the fantasy of a clean and seamlessly integrated information space is just a different story. Which is GOOD news.

 As I attended the „Really Modern Library“ meeting, I directly came from the Frankfurt Book Fair where I had picked up a copy of Don Delillo’s new novel „Falling Man“, in German, yet not the book, which was released only a couple of weeks later, but a 20 odd pages short cut version in the supplement of the German high brow weekly Die Zeit. This was NOT a first chapter, but an abridged version of a full scale novel, reduced to its core (yet still very much readable!), not by some pirates or lunatics, but by the German editor plus translator, plus by Don Delillo himself.

Of course, the magazne version was meant to provide some innovative promotion for the book. But it was clearly inspired by the „Web“ mode of dealing with text: There are just many ways of representing any text, or thought, or music – „or whatever“ (as any 14 year old, like my son, would have it).

This comes with at least 2 problems:

1. There is no ‚one‘ text anymore, but many texts for each piece (e.g. I wrote about this insight, a week ago, in German at Perlentaucher, but now rewrite it, in English for my blog – and don’t bother to have it in print anywhere at this point. So there is no definite, ‚reliable‘ version of these thoughts).  Which directly brings me to

2. A serious problem for the copyright debate, as an ever enhanced copyright legislation desperately needs that one original piece of content to protect – yet exactly this is what is just falling apart, or even better, turning into drifting sands.

 This is probably one of the more tricky issues that any „Really Modern Library“ will need to confront:

The books in the really old library were valuable BECAUSE its items, books, came with the quality of being reliable: They had a cover page and a back page, and a clearly defined content between those ends.

The stupid question that results is this: Can there be a library, without such books?

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