Twice every year, around mid-May and mid-December, a curious lull befalls the frenzied lives of literary agents, like those abrupt silences that occasionally muffle a party when everybody, inexplicably, stops talking at exactly the same time. I’ve experienced enough of these semiannual brownouts that I ought to expect them by now. Yet they always take me by surprise, and I can predictably be heard at these times barking to my staff, “Is there something wrong with our phones? Is this a mail holiday or what?” At length it occurs to me: it’s sales conference season.

Do you know what happens at sales conferences? If not, you owe it to yourself to read up on them.

At midyear trade e-book sales are more than 70% higher than those of the same period last year, according to Michael Smith, Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Smith was citing stats gathered by the Association of American Publishers.

Year to Date Revenue is also up, a whopping 47.5%.

Smith made it clear that:

* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade e-book sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices”
* The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

As so many other economic indicators plunge, it’s comforting indeed to learn that this brave new industry is thriving.

– RC

If you’ve been wondering, as I have, when the E-Book Revolution would find its way to textbooks, it’s now no further than your keyboard.

If any aspect of the book business were ripe for revolution it’s textbooks, because it’s closest to the music industry in terms of the SRI – the Student Resentment Index. College students have been complaining for decades about being compelled to pay preposterously high prices for school books of which they may be required to use only a few chapters. Though there is a secondary market for those books, publishers and authors have gotten around it by producing new editions, often merely cosmetically enhanced, and requiring students to buy them instead of used ones. The process is particularly cruel on families on a tight budget. And it’s not that hot on the spines of students lugging fifteen or twenty pounds of books in their backpacks.

The logical question is, “Why can’t we just download?”

Noam Cohen’s article in the New York Times, Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free discusses new approaches by students and parents who feel ripped off by a conspiracy of publishers, textbook authors, and colleges.

Recognizing the injustice, at least one denizen of academia, Professor R. Preston McAfee of Cal Tech, has forgone the traditional route and a big advance in order to deliver a free download of an economics textbook he has authored. The book is also for sale in an on-demand print edition, but for a fraction of the price that students would have to pay at their college bookstore. “This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” Cohen quotes Professor McAfee. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

Cohen cites other attractively priced approaches to Web delivery of math, science, economics and other big-ticket textbooks. These breakthroughs come along just as tablet-reader technology solutions accelerate. A tipping point may be closer than anyone (except a core group of wild-eyed visionaries like yours truly) could have imagined a few years ago.

– Richard Curtis

Chapter 1: An Agent Looks at the Market

In the beginning are the words: fifty thousand, seventy-five thousand, a hundred thousand or more. They comprise the book manuscripts that arrive at my agency’s offices each day in sturdy gray canvas mail sacks or piled on the United Parcel Service man’s creaking dolly. A few weeks ago, the day’s batch was assigned to our readers for preliminary evaluation. Our readers are a congenial group of highly intelligent men and women who have all worked at publishing houses and are voracious consumers of literature, the kind who, after reading manuscripts all day for a living, love nothing more than to settle down with a good book at the end of the day. These people have excellent taste and well-honed commercial instincts, and they take great joy in discovering new talent, a joy made keener by the generous bonus I offer for any manuscript they recommend that goes on to get sold.

They have completed their appraisals of the manuscripts that came in two weeks ago, and written their reports and recommendations. If a recommendation was favorable, or even ambivalent, the manuscript was then routed to one of my associates or to me. Now, at 10:00 a.m., after filling our mugs from the coffee machine in our kitchen, my staff and I have sat down to talk about the manuscripts before us. As you are an agent-in-training, I would like to invite you to attend today’s conference so you can be privy to the process by which the fate of those manuscripts is determined. And as you are also an author, and your own manuscript may be among those discussed this morning, I know you’ll want to be there. How do you take your coffee?

To read this chapter in its entirety, use Google Books.

David Pogue in the New York Times announces the imminent rollout – in Target Stores of all places — of The Peek, a device so single-mindedly dedicated to email that if you dissect it you will find not a trace of a bell nor a hint of a whistle. Go ahead and dissect it: for $100 you can replace it. But don’t try to browse the Web on it, check your calendar, watch a video, produce a spreadsheet, or even phone home. You want convergence? Buy a BlackBerry. The only thing The Peek converges with is your email account.

Call it a DumbPhone, but there are a lot of people who don’t care, don’t want anything more sophisticated and can’t afford it anyway.

At a glance The Peek looks like BlackBerry’s skinny kid sister in a training bra.

“The first time you turn on the Peek,” Pogue writes, “you’re asked for your e-mail address and password. If it’s a Web-based account like Hotmail, Gmail or AOL, that’s all there is to it. The Peek automatically checks for new messages every 5 to 15 minutes, and notifies you with a little chime, a little vibrating buzz and a blinking blue light in the corner. (You can also check on demand.)”

Navigation couldn’t be easier, and if you’re from the K.I.S.S. school — Keep It Simple, Stupid — the Peek is refreshingly fundamental. You can read about it in Pogue’s article or visit getpeek.com. Thumbs not included.

My prediction? A runaway hit!

– Richard Curtis

Sam McCade, William C. Dietz’s asskicking military science fiction hero, is reporting for action in E-Reads’ release of the four classic titles chronicling one man’s war to prevent the imminent destruction of the Terran Empire. Read Dietz’s special introduction to the series in the first novel, Galactic Bounty, then consume the sequels as fast as you can: Imperial Bounty, Alien Bounty and McCade’s Bounty.

And here’s a bonus: we’ve also brought back Dietz’s tense space thriller, Bodyguard Ride shotgun with Max Maxon on a hairraising trip to get a teenage girl safely back to Earth. Hang on tight: it will not be an uneventful voyage.

Look in this space for news of a paperback edition of Bodyguard coming your way soon.

- RC

The paternalistic treatment of authors by editors in the Maxwell Perkins era described in Part 1 of this article produced many inequities, for publishers took advantage of many authors who were too ignorant, shy, or well-bred to demand good terms of their editors. Knowing that most authors write for love, publishers tended to assume that they didn’t care about writing for money.

Resentment toward publishers over their exploitation of authors created the conditions for the rise to power of literary agents. Read how everything changed, and how we define editors in the 21st century.

Driven by the same E-Ink technology that powers Sony’s eReader and Amazon’s Kindle, Mountain View California’s Plastic Logic will soon release a large-screen reader designed to carry your daily newspaper, according to Eric A. Taub in the New York Times. The screen will be twice the size of the eReader and Kindle and just about the same weight but two thirds thinner.

You’ll be able to buy it in summer of 2009, but the economics of newspaper subscription haven’t been worked out. It could be far more expensive than subscription to the paper version, not even counting the cost of the device itself. In time we may see the newspaper equivalent of Gillette’s “Give away the razor and sell the blades,” but too much remains to be settled about technology, economics, psychology and customs before the next generation is as comfortable with downloading newspapers as today’s aging populace is with ink on newsprint. But with magazines and newspapers dying, the lure of huge savings on downloads may prove overwhelmingly tempting. Though European culture may not be an accurate guide, the iRex’a iLiad newspaper and magazine reader may show us how an Old World society can adapt to a completely new way of reading the daily news.

The Plastic Logic reader (it doesn’t have a name yet – you got any suggestions?) also brings us a little closer to the tablet-sized device that will inevitably revolutionize the classroom.

– Richard Curtis

Fantasy fans of Dave Duncan will be pleased to know that 8 titles are now back in print. The Cursed, a novel, and two series, The Seventh Sword (all 3 books), and A Handful of Men (all 4 books), are in paperback as well as E-Book editions as of September. Dave is a prolific and wonderful Canadian writer, and in the opinion of his many readers, a master of swashbuckling and magical adventure fantasy.

The Cursed
Reluctant Swordsman, The (Book One of The Seventh Sword)
Coming Of Wisdom, The (Book Two of The Seventh Sword)
Destiny of the Sword, The (Book Three of The Seventh Sword)
Cutting Edge, The (Book One of A Handful of Men )
Upland Outlaws (Book Two of A Handful Of Men)
Stricken Field, The (Book Three of A Handful Of Men)
Living God, The (Book Four of A Handful of Men )

According to the latest statistics reported by the IDPF (here), the momentum of new ebook titles added by major publishers this year and the popularity of the Kindle and Sony Reader have had a big effect on E-Book revenues in the publishing industry.

“Trade eBook sales were $4,900,000 for June 2008, an 87.4% increase over June 2007. Calendar Year to Date Revenue is up 43%.” – IDPF, Sept. 4, 2008

Looking back a bit farther, in the last 2 years the ebook sector has doubled its revenue; more publishers and more titles have come into the marketplace creating a huge surge. This is what we at E-Reads are proud to see. For many years it seemed E-Books were a sleepy little industry, but the boom in consumer awareness has come from a lot of publishers seeding the growth by adding more and more mid-list and back-list titles, with digital versions finally coming out of the shadow of their print counterparts. Popular proprietary platforms like the Kindle and Reader have assisted publishers in making the decision to invest more in digitization and good DAW (Digital Archive Workflow) practices, because the big names of Sony and Amazon carry a lot of weight in boardroom decision making.

Knowing that the E-Book tide continues to swell, has that given you more confidence to try ebooks or buy a new reading device?

- Michael Gaudet