Though books are among the noblest expressions of civilization, like other art forms they can be dangerous. Authors have been imprisoned and even executed because of them. Libraries have been sacked and books destroyed in bonfires because of the ideas they contained. Of recent memory, a fatwah was issued against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, and the Turks prosecuted an author under Law 301 forbidding “Unturkishness” in books published in their country.

There is little risk, however, that bookstore employees will be trampled to death by customers rampaging through their shop aisles on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that customarily initiates the holiday shopping season. Unlike stampeding shoppers who fatally ran over a Wal-Mart employee on Black Friday this year, bookstore shopping was conducted with the decorum one expects from well bred ladies, gentlemen and children, as I personally observed in a Barnes & Noble store in New York’s Lincoln Center area.

Books are worth fighting for and even dying for. But they’re not worth killing your neighbor over. Supplies are abundant, and if your store runs out of stock, it will be replenished soon enough, or you can buy it online.

Let people beat each other’s brains in over 32-inch flat-screen TV. Book shoppers, the cultured guardians of civilization, browse bookstore shelves, quietly make their selections and queue up patiently to pay for their purchases. Dignity and order prevail. They leave the shop clutching their books like talismen against the barbarism that would crush a living soul to death for a bargain on an X-Box at a discount store.

We are not animals. We are people of peace, we book people.

RC

Greg Bear calls George Zebrowski “one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration.” Zebrowski has published more than seventy works of short fiction and more than a hundred and forty articles and essays in every major fantasy and science fiction publication. E-Reads carries a number of his books, and we’re happy to say that some of his most visionary works are in production. We’ll be announcing them soon. Until we do, The Omega Point Trilogy will keep you well absorbed.

6599 A.D. The war between the Earth Federation and the Herculean Empire has been over for more than three centuries. The planet in the Hercules Globular Cluster is a cinder; the few descendants of the surviving Empire live half a galaxy away in what seems to be a religious commune. But on an unnamed planet deep within the Hercules Cluster, two survivors, father and son, gather their resources and plan a reign of terror against Federation worlds.

Rising to one of the most unusual climaxes in recent fantastic literature, this novel of chase and vengeance depicts a colorful, poetic future struggling to overcome its past. Filled with striking twists and vivid ideas, Omega Point Trilogy is space adventure at its most modern.

When you finish it, check out Sunspacers Trilogy. Then watch this space for news of E-Reads Zebrowski releases.

RC

You can try calling your bookmaker about placing a bet on La Dotta Mano, but after checking the entries at Pimlico he will tell you there’s no such nag. That’s because it’s not the name of a horse. It’s the name of a book.

Oops – wrong bookmaker. The makers of this particular book are skilled Old World craftsmen hand-sculpting a Carrara marble-bound edition of plates of Michaelangelo drawings and sculptures. A copy of the extremely limited edition goes on exhibit today at the New York Public Library, as reported by David Carr in the New York Times. “La Dotta Mano” means “The Wise Hand” and the work is arguably il piu bello libro nel mondo.

It may also be il piu pesante – the world’s heaviest. We thought Phaidon’s 800 page Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture was heavy at fifteen pounds. La Dotta Mano weighs in at about sixty-two. Around the size of a Siberian Husky, except you don’t wear white gloves to shlep a Siberian Husky. You’d better wear them to protect your investment if you browse La Dotta Mano, however – the book sells for 100,000 Euros. Despite the price, some twenty bibliophiles have purchased it. They are undoubtedly reinforcing their bookshelves as we speak.

For more about the genesis of this remarkable book, click here. And check out this video of the cover being produced.

RC

Random House’s CEO Markus Dohle wants to expand the company’s e-book list by a serious multiple, taking the inventory from 8000 to something approaching 15,000. Matt Shatz, Random’s VP for digital operations, says sales of e-books have been soaring.

They certainly have been, as we have reported here. But E-book sales have a long way to go before matching the size or profitability of good old fashioned printed books. For that reason, and because any bold investment in today’s economic climate is worth cheering for, Random’s commitment to a dramatic increase in e-content is a very good sign.

RC

Though our mouths were full of song as the sea,
and our tongues of exultation as the multitude of its waves,
and our lips of praise as the wide-extended firmament;
though our eyes shone with light like the sun and the moon,
and our hands were spread forth like the eagles of heaven,
and our feet were swift as hinds,
we should still be unable to thank thee and bless thy name,
O Lord our God and God of our fathers,
for one thousandth or one ten thousandth part of the bounties which thou has bestowed upon our fathers and upon us.

- from the Hebrew Prayer Book

Tim Arango reports in the New York Times that Digital Sales Surpass CDs at Atlantic. This should come as no surprise to fifteen-year-olds. In fact, it should come as a surprise to no one of any age. But it’s still another sign that the media is undergoing one of the profoundest transformations in the history of human communications.

Does that mean that dollars have also tipped from the hard copy side to the virtual? Not according to John Rose, a former music business executive quoted by Arango. “It’s not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,” Rose observed.

“With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers,” writes Arango. “While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast.”

This too is no surprise to any business person caught in that terminator line where the fading light of the old media meets the rising sun of the new.

Where is the money disappearing to? Once you recite the motto of the new generation – “Information wants to be free” – it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

RC

Has it come to this? According to the New York Observer’s Leon Neyfakh, editors and publishing company executives are being asked to cut back on lunches. Neyfakh’s headline says it all: Publishing Bigshots Told to Open Canned Tuna, Eat at Desk

But it gets worse: some agents are splitting lunch bills with editors or – ohmigod! – treating entirely.

ICM co-head Esther Newberg suggested that maybe agents and editors could start splitting bills instead of saddling publishers with the whole thing as per tradition. “We’re all part of this economic crisis,” says Newberg. “I think that we can alternate. I think that would certainly be fair.”

I dunno. Most agencies are far from behemoths, and even paying the tip for the coat check attendant is likely to trigger cardiac infarction in any agent who as little as six months ago didn’t hesitate to order the three pound lobster without checking the menu for the price per pound. Another agent mentioned in Neyfakh’s article, Ira Silverberg, can see the handwriting on Le Bernardin’s wall. “We can get together and have a shawarma and sit in the park and talk about writers. The social time is really important, but what is not important is how expensive the food is.”

Shawarma? In the park? If an agent is asking $2500 for a cowboy novel, maybe. But soliciting a $5 million pre-empt for the hottest novel since Fear of Flying with shawarma grease dripping into your lap?

I don’t think so.

Nefakh debriefed some other execs about The New Frugality. Check out his article and learn who’s eating in the company cafeteria.

And if you’re feeling sentimental about the Golden Age of Publishing Lunches, when asking an agent to contribute a penny was a flagrant breach of courtesy spelling the irrevocable rupture of the relationship, I invite you to read “Let’s Have Lunch” from my book How to Be Your Own Literary Agent.

Richard Curtis

Motoko Rich in the New York Times reports that Education Media and Publishing Group, the Irish owner of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, “borrowed heavily to finance the acquisitions of Houghton Mifflin in 2006 and, last year, Harcourt.” How much, exactly? Jeremy Dickens, the private-equity company’s president who this week announced a temporary halt of acquisitions, put it at “about $7 billion in debt outstanding, on which it was paying about $500 million in debt service annually,” says Rich, who makes it clear that the purchase freeze was directed at the company’s consumer book business, not the textbooks. The former comprises less than 6 percent of total revenues.

Yesterday we speculated on the possibility the company or some part of it might have to be sold to relieve debt pressure. Dickens denied it – sort of. “If there’s a transaction that makes sense for all of our stakeholders, we’ll consider it,” he stated, admitting that some trade publishers had been sounding the company out.

We thought one of them could be Hachette. Interestingly, Hachette and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt were paired in Rich’s article for another reason. Contrasting the bleak news from HMH, Hachette announced a holiday bonus for all its employees amounting to one week’s salary.

RC

The Dark Horse paperback edition of The Knight and Knave of Swords, the seventh novel in Fritz Leiber’s classic Lankhmar fantasy adventure series, which Publishers Weekly described as “One of the great works of fantasy of this century,” is now on sale. Or you may wish to buy E-Reads’ e-book edition. (Pictured on the left is the Dark Horse cover and on the right, the E-Reads cover.)

Ramsey Campbell, the highly regarded British horror author called him, “the greatest living writer of supernatural horror fiction”. Drawing many of his own themes from Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and H.P Lovecraft, master manipulator Fritz Leiber is a worldwide legend within the Fantasy genre, actually having coined the term “Sword and Sorcery” that would describe the sub-genre he would more than help create.

While THE LORD OF THE RINGS took the world by storm, Leiber’s fantastic but thoroughly flawed anti-heroes, Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, adventured and stumbled deep within the caves of Inner Earth as well, albeit a different one than Tolkien’s. They wondered and wandered to the edges of the Outer Sea, across the Land of Nehwon and throughout every nook and cranny of gothic Lankhmar, Nehwon’s grandest and most mystically corrupt city. Lankhmar is Leiber’s fully realized, vivid, incarnation of urban decay and civilization’s corroding effect on the human psyche. Fafhrd and Mouse are not innocents; their world is no land of honor and righteousness. It is a world of human complexities and violent action, of discovery and mystery, of swords and sorcery.

“Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are virtually a genre unto themselves. Urbane, idiosyncratic, comic, erotic and human, spiked with believable action of a master fantasist!”
–William Gibson

“After too long a wait, the master story teller of us all returns with a huge, anecdotal adventure in the magic-drenched lives of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Glowing imagination melds with gorgeous language to make this one of Leiber’s very best…which is a better best than this poor world usually has to offer. Leiber’s back: rejoice!”
-Harlan Ellison

“It’s all Fritz Leiber’s fault. If he weren’t such a deadly fine fantasist I wouldn’t be stopping everything to read his tales. And if he weren’t such a master I wouldn’t occasionally look out of the window and wish he’d interrupt my routine again, as he doesn’t do it often enough. THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS came into my life and took over an otherwise fully programmed afternoon. I stop everything when a new Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story comes into my hands.”
–Roger Zelazny

Visit Leiber’s page on E-Reads to see the complete Lankhmar series and some other great Leiber novels as well.

RC

If Oprah nearly lost it over v. 1 of the Kindle, it’s hard to imagine what she’ll do when she holds v. 2 in her hands. Though Amazon has thrown cold water on rumors, they just don’t go away. TechCrunch.com quotes “Our sources” to confirm that the long awaited, long debated second version of the Kindle will be released early in the coming year.

“Our sources” is not exactly the kind of collateral you can take to the bank to borrow against your mortgage. But it actually does make sense. We’ve reported on serious development and actual announcements of competitors, especially in the area of tablet-sized handhelds suitable for students. Jeff Bezos may be hearing those footsteps

So, for what it’s worth, TechCrunch.com’s somewhat ethereal sources say Kindle 2 is tentatively scheduled to go on sale in “early next quarter.”

RC