Telling viewers that a gift of a Kindle changed her life this past summer, Oprah Winfrey gave a huge endorsement to Amazon’s e-reading device in front of God and everybody. Well, maybe not God, but Jeff Bezos, who appeared with her on the program.

For viewers intimidated by the Kindle’s list price, her website is offering a promotion knocking $50.00 off the purchase price through Friday, October 31st. That happens to be Halloween, but this is all treat and no trick.

Check it out.

RC

In Butcher, Rex Miller brings back the heart-eating villain of Slob, Daniel “Chaingang” Bunkowski, the anti-hero you hate to love. After a seemingly endless term in prison, he is hungrier then ever to get his teeth into some bloody violence. The opportunities for mayhem were pretty limited in the maximum-security prison where he was being held for so long. Now that he’s out, his keeper, Dr. Norman, is anxious to put him to work. He has given Chaingang an important task: hunt down and destroy the one man who is more savage than himself. Doc Royal has been living quietly in rural Missouri, successfully hiding his secret youth as a death-loving Nazi. However, his past is about to come and haunt his present, just when Chaingang arrives to distract him from his troubles…

If Butcher keeps you up tonight, you might want to read other Chaingang horror thrillers by Rex Miller.

RC

Yesterday I commented on a news item about a publisher, St. Martin’s Press, that had released a book as an original e-book. I said,

It raises a provocative question for authors and agents (and publishing lawyers): is there anything in a conventional book contract that prevents your publisher from releasing your book originally as an e-book? Or, for that matter, exclusively as an e-book as opposed to print on paper? I would guess that the author of the St. Martin’s Press book explicitly waived his right to have his book published first in a hardcover or paperback volume. But what about us garden variety authors? Could a publisher elect to go straight into e-book without our express permission?

After I wrote this I realized these questions only give rise to more questions.

Suppose that the St. Martin’s book were not merely a one-time exception to the traditional practice of publishing books originally in print format. Suppose instead that it was the first step in a major shift among conventional book publishers – the Random Houses, Simon & Schusters, the HarperCollins, as well as the St. Martinses — from launching books in hard copy to launching them in e-book format – indeed, to launching them only in e-book format.

This is not a fanciful question. Given the inefficient economies of print publication, and the efficiencies of digital publication, it is entirely possible that we could experience the same kind of shift that we are seeing in the newspaper and magazine business as the paper-reading generation gives way to a digitally-oriented one. (I am writing this on the day that the New York Times reported a 51% drop in earnings.)

If original e-book publication becomes not merely an occasional or optional event but a primary format – well, what does that say for the identities of the Random Houses, Simon & Schusters, HarperCollins, and St. Martinses? What does it say for the publishing industry? For editors? For authors? For — omigod — agents?

Just asking!

– Richard Curtis

Publishers Weekly recent carried the news item that St. Martin’s Press was launching its first exclusive e-book title, The 100 Day Action Plan to Save the Planet by William Becker. Obviously it’s a book about the environment and, as the news item pointed out, “releasing the title as an e-book would be the most environmentally-friendly approach.” It sounds like a book everyone should read, and we applaud St. Martin’s initiative for going straight to e-book.

It does however raise a provocative question for authors and agents (and publishing lawyers): is there anything in a conventional book contract that prevents your publisher from releasing your book originally as an e-book? Or, for that matter, exclusively as an e-book as opposed to print on paper? I would guess that the author of the St. Martin’s Press book explicitly waived his right to have his book published first in a hardcover or paperback volume. But what about us garden variety authors? Could a publisher elect to go straight into e-book without our express permission?

Just asking!

I raised the question in a column years ago and raise it again now. It might be worthwhile for author and agent organizations to examine publisher boilerplate and, if I’m right, push to sew up this loophole.

– Richard Curtis

Scientists are exploring a multitude of applications for “buckypaper,” a tissue-thin and steel-strong fabric made up of carbon nanotubes. Because of its strength and vast surface area – a gram of it could theoretically blanket about 3000 square yards – it may one day provide the vehicle for the e-ink that is the basis for electronic newspapers, magazines, and books.

For a fascinating article and video on buckypaper, click here.

- RC

John Markoff writing in the New York Times (A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer) describes the terrifying phenomenon of robot-herding cyberbriminals turning computers loose on other computers to take them over for the purpose of sending out email spam, mine for financial information, or spread viruses. For all you know, your computer might be one of these very “zombies”.

Markoff writes,

Botnets remain an Internet scourge. Active zombie networks created by a growing criminal underground peaked last month at more than half a million computers, according to shadowserver.org, an organization that tracks botnets. Even though security experts have diminished the botnets to about 300,000 computers, that is still twice the number detected a year ago.

The actual numbers may be far larger; Microsoft investigators, who say they are tracking about 1,000 botnets at any given time, say the largest network still controls several million PCs.

As I read the Times article bells went off and I remembered a marvelous novel, Lingo by Jim Menick, which I agented a while back and have since reissued in E-Reads. “Lingo” was Brewster Billings pet name for the home computer he programmed with the ability to talk to its owner. In time Lingo’s intellectual achievements began to grow exponentially, rapidly exhausting its existing memory. Given the fact that the novel was published in 1991, you can imagine just how limited Lingo’s memory was — four or five megabytes of RAM, maybe?

Then Lingo figures out how to penetrate the memory banks of the military’s ultra-secret computer network and ballistic missile launch system, and suddenly this light science fiction romp turns scary dark, especially when US government officials threaten to pull Lingo’s plug. The Soviet Union’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile command is on full alert in case Lingo doesn’t take kindly to threats.

Read Lingo, then reread Markoff’s article and contemplate the power of today’s computer’s and the possibility that they could do a Lingo of their own and shake hands with their brothers and sisters in the Defense Department. If you don’t have enough worries to keep you up all night long, that’s definitely a candidate.

The reviews for Lingo were glowing:

“In the end, Lingo turns out to be among the more lighthearted catastrophe thrillers to be conceived since The Mouse That Roared. It makes you think a little, and it makes you smile a lot.”
–-Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times

“A witty, ingenious, and thought-provoking gambol with a Frankenstein monster in computer clothing.”
-–Kirkus Reviews

“A delightful romp into a funny but frightening world of high-tech probabilities.”
-–Chicago Tribune

“Wildly comedic…realizes your worst fear of a computer taking over the world.”
-–Los Angeles Times

“Hilarious…entertaining and thought provoking.”
-–The Washington Post

– Richard Curtis

Our society is heavily dependent on brand names for the selection of consumer goods, and the consumer of books is no different from the consumer of soap powder. Publishers are confronted by a serious problem in this respect, however, because when it comes to selecting books, the “brand name” of the publisher means nothing to the consumer. Oh sure, the average book buyer is probably more familiar with the names of Random House, Doubleday, and Simon & Schuster than with firms like Beacon Press or Chelsea House, but he or she does not prefer Random House books over Beacon Press ones. The book buyer has no brand name loyalty, and little brand name recognition: I warrant 90 percent of all readers cannot tell you the name of the publisher of the book they are currently reading. Readers who loved a recent Putnam book could not care less about Putnam books in general, and if the author moved to Viking his readers would buy his Viking books as avidly as they bought his Putnam ones.

For a discussion of the relationship of branding and publishers, click here.

“What man, in his deepest heart,” asks John Norman, “does not want to own a female, to have her for his own, utterly, as a devoted, passionate, vulnerable, mastered slave, and what woman, in her deepest heart, does not want to be so intensely desired, so unqualifiedly and fiercely desired, that nothing less than her absolute ownership will satisfy a male, her master?”

In a letter about Prize of Gor, the soon to be released 27th novel in his phenomenally popular Gorean Chronicles, Norman reasserts the philosophy that has intoxicated fans and appalled conventional readers. As for the latter, Norman asserts, “Perhaps some people cannot even understand such things, such desire, such passion. Let them then cling to their tepidities. Gor is for those who do understand such things.”

If you are among those who have cast off your tepidities, Prize of Gor will be a rewarding if not rapturous read for you. Its protagonist is an older woman taken to Gor and given a drug that restores her youth. What exactly is the prize of the novel’s title? “Prize of Gor is a Kajira novel,” writes Norman. “The notion of ‘prize’ is quite Gorean, given the typical Gorean celebration of the intelligence and beauty of the human female, a form of life so remarkable, fascinating, exciting, and desirable to the Gorean male that he is typically content with nothing less than its possession.”

Hear John Norman talk about his heroine:

… a college professor specializing in Feminist Studies, and such, whom life, largely due to the constraints of her ideology, self-image, and such, has largely passed by. She has never known love, for instance. Her life is closing, darkening about the edges, a life, as she now suspects, largely misguided, worthless, and wasted. In her youth, however, she was incredibly beautiful, and was so even in her first teaching years. Have we not all seen photos of elderly women as they were in their youth, and marveled at their beauty?…Let us see how her theories hold up, once she is at a man’s feet, young, beautiful, and collared. She will learn the ways of Gor, and, in doing so, will learn her lost womanhood and its hitherto neglected possibilities, glories, and riches. She will then find herself, to her astonishment, on this incredible and vibrant world, a prize, one to become no more than a domestic animal which, at the merest word of a male, must kneel, press her lips to a whip, and hope to be found pleasing.

Watch this page for more news about Prize of Gor.

– Richard Curtis

As Jack Malcolm, owner of the Seattle computing firm Megasoft, is answering questions about his candidacy for President of the U.S., he is assassinated by a terrorist on national television. Just weeks later, Jonathan Goodman, an employee at Megasoft, witnesses a murder of another employee and watches the killer escape inside Building 9. But did anyone know he was there watching? Determined to uncover the mystery, Goodman and his new partner, business reporter Karen Grey, discover a major conspiracy.

That’s the story line of Ulterior Motive, and if you’re wondering if “Megasoft” sounds an awful lot like another company in Seattle, consider the author, Daniel Oran. He’s famous at Microsoft for being the creator of the start button and taskbar. Or maybe all resemblances between the fictional venue and the one in Seattle are strictly coincidental. You tell me.

– Richard Curtis

E-Reads’ rerelease of Bodyguard, William C. Dietz’s science fiction thriller, is now available in paperback as well as e-book download. Just to refresh your memory…

Max Maxon is an ex-marine who makes his living with a gun. Sasha Casad is a rich teenager trying to catch the next spaceship home. Max’s job is to get her there alive. Somebody’s trying to stop them – somebody with plenty of money and firepower. That doesn’t bother Max. A contract is a contract. Against all odds, he’s going to fulfill this one.

And then he’s going to make somebody pay.

Check it out along with nine other great reissues by this master storyteller.

- RC