For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early ’90s Publisher’s Weekly ran literary agent Richard Curtis’s end-of-the-year summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, “Merger, He Wrote,” (1986), “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine” (1989) and “Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off” (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with “The Year of the Platform,” which boasted such lines as,

But are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

PW’s 2008 year-end issue is out and carries Curtis’s latest poetic effusion, “The Coming of the POD People“. Here’s a taste:

David Carr of the New York Times reports that, TriCityNews, a newspaper serving Monmouth County, New Jersey does not make its editions available on the Web, and has no intention of doing so. Except for a display of ad and product information, there’s no link to the news section of the paper. Okay, don’t believe it. Click here and see for yourself.

“Why would I put anything on the Web?” Carr quote the paper’s owner and publisher Dan Jacobson. “I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?”

It’s tempting to call Jacobson’s attitude counter-intuitive, but it’s actually completely intuitive and logical. It’s also completely successful: according to Carr,

Into the teeth of a historic recession, the newspaper had just published the biggest issue in its history. The product is double-digit profitable, and it has been growing at a clip of about 10 percent a year since it was founded in 1999, right about the time the Web was beginning to put its hands around print’s neck.

Carr thinks it’s too early to call it a trend. TriCity is pretty much mom-and-pop in size and local in distribution. It may simply be that a lot of old-fashioned people like to read an old-fashioned newspaper the old-fashioned way, with newsprint on their fingers. At the same time, some major newspapers and magazine are rethinking this Information Wants To Be Free gimmick, which is truly counter-intuitive, especially when your bottom line is plummeting because nobody’s paying for clicks and Web ad revenue is not as lucrative as the paper version.

Look for a retrenchment of the “Free” business model to be a theme of the year to come. The Reformation started with an itemized list of complaints posted on a church door. Maybe the modern equivalent will be launched in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Read the Times’s piece in detail. Go ahead. It’s free!

RC

Even though you’ve known someone for decades, you always learn something when you read his obituary. Such is the case with Julius Fast, who recently passed away and whose life is celebrated in an obituary in the New York Times. In Julie’s case, I did not realize that he was the very first recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the highest honor achievable by mystery writers. It was awarded to him in 1946, the inaugural year of the “Edgar”, for his 1945 first novel Watchful at Night. Nor did I know that he had served as an army medic in World War II.

What I’ve always known about him is that he was a prolific, versatile and speedy writer with a journalist’s nose for a hot trend, as many of his nonfiction books demonstrate. None was hotter than the psychological research revealing how much our body language reveals to those perceptive enough to pick up cues in the attitude of our head or the fidgeting of our hands. The appropriately named Fast seized on the revelations and produced Body Language, which E-Reads publishes in e-book format.

Adios, Julie.

RC

Whole Foods uses it to update product information;
The L. A. Fire Department uses it to alert firefighters to blazes;
NASA uses it to break news of Mars Lander discoveries;
And a certain presidential candidate used it to update voters on his political activities.

Now Twitter is being used by would-be novelists to blast installments of their books in progress to friends. Twitter is the social networking service that enables users to blog in microbursts of no more than 140 characters. To give you some sense of what that means, the previous two sentences are 187 characters long, meaning that if they were a scene in my novel I would have to trim 47 characters to bring it down to the length of an acceptable “tweet,” as Twitter posts are called. If you tend to logorrhea, Twitter is an excellent antidote. I have revised the above two verbose sentences and pared them down to a 139-character miracle of concision:

Pre-Twitter:

Now Twitter is being used by would-be novelists to blast installments of their books in progress to friends. Twitter is the social networking service that enables users to blog in microbursts of no more than 140 characters.

Post-Twitter:

Now Twitter, the social networking service, is being used by novelists to blast installments of books in progress to friends. Blogs must be less than 141 characters.

It’s possible that, at 140 characters per installment, a work of Jamesian length and quality is achievable, but don’t count on it. In fact, authors are loath to dignify their creations with the term “novel”. Even “novelette” may be far too grandiose. Teeny-Weeny Novelini? Actually, there is a word for the new genre, according to Matt Richtel, writing about the phenomenon in the New York Times. It’s called a Twiller – that is, Twitter-thriller. The author – or perhaps tweeter, to avoid confusion with such practitioners as Tolstoy and Balzac – delivers blasts to other users signed up to receive them, and voila! – in three or four centuries, you have a full-length book! Here’s the plot of Richtel’s story:

It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cellphone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon.

Where can I sign up? Here.

We’ve been updating you on the Japanese proclivity for cellphone fiction, but it would seem that our Asian counterparts are far too long-winded for American twiller tweeters impatient to claim their Nobel Prize for Literature.

So, tweeters, work on discarding those adjectives and adverbs. And while you’re at it, cut down on those character-bloating verbs and nouns. And I’ve always wondered just what the hell we need pronouns for, anyway.

Richard

Last summer plans were revealed for a Dubai building so spectacular that if someone told you it was a rendering for a fantasy set in the 24th century painted by an artist stoned on ganja, you would nod and say, Of course. In fact, construction of the 80 story Dynamic Tower office/hotel/residence is scheduled to commence in 2009 and completion is slated for 2010.

Who would live there? The very rich, and obviously a few of that breed have survived the current economic horror show. One reporter writes that “Over 140 reservation requests have arrived from the United States, followed by the UK (94) and Australia (57), as well as Italy, China, New Zealand, and other countries throughout the world. More than 50 reservations were submitted specifically for the Dynamic Tower’s luxury villas, with prices starting at 20 million Euros (US $30 million).” There’s another tower like this one in the works for Moscow.

And what is it about this building that inspires superlatives? How about, each floor revolves at its own speed? How about, each of the luxury “villas” on the top ten floors has its own parking space and swimming pool? How about, the building is energy efficient thanks to horizontal wind turbines separating each storey from the ones above and below? How about, the building is being prefabricated in Italy? How about, the architect says he never designed a skyscraper before this? One blogger describes it as “the single biggest mindf**k of our time…80 stories of rotating madness.”

Check out Eye on Dubai: Spinning Skyscraper Lines Up 140 U.S. Buyers?!. A video is accompanied by Richard Strauss’s Also Spracht Zarathustra, the same megapompous theme used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, but one has to admit that the first glimpse of the tower inspires awe akin to that first breathtaking view of Kubrick’s space station.

The structure does raise a few questions: plumbing, for instance. So let me get this straight: my master bedroom toilet starts out over your master bedroom toilet, but in ten minutes it will pass over your kitchen; ten minutes after that over your swimming pool, and ten after that over the Bentley in your garage. All this while the blades of a gigantic wind turbine whirl between my floor and your ceiling. So, when exactly do I flush?

Just asking.

RC

If you think that a book editor experiences less terror over the prospect of losing a job than an automobile plant machinist, you’ll want to read Leon Neyfakh’s New York Observer article, FSG Feels Icy Bite in Publishing Freeze. “Those individuals who are being spit out in the process,” Neyfakh writes, “particularly those veteran editors and executives who have been booted from high-level positions, are having a harder time than ever finding jobs in the industry that are appropriate to their level of experience and offer the authority they have grown accustomed to wielding in the course of their careers.”

Scores of musical chairs have been yanked out of the publishing ballroom and when the music resumes – if it ever does – there just won’t be that many seats. Editors and other publishing executives, as well as untold numbers of junior workers, find themselves considering freelance editorial jobs, starting literary agencies or taking on menial tasks, but may find even those pickings slim, too. Some shockingly big names are standing outside looking in and it’s getting cold and discouraging.

It’s easy to say that the publishing industry brought this on itself, but in this season of compassion we do well to remember that the “industry” is made up of people with names and faces, people with bills to pay and mouths to feed. And it’s easy to talk about the Digital Revolution, but revolutions produce victims. A great many of those who have lost jobs are our friends, and our hearts go out to them.

RC

The centerpiece of Women in Deep Time, Greg Bear’s trio of stories with a common theme, is the Nebula Award-winning novella Hardfought. The common theme is “the female psyche, multiplied and divided,” says Bear in the book’s introduction. “There’s probably something Jungian in common with all three. At any rate, throughout my writing career (and for whatever reason) I’ve been fascinated by the feminine voice.”

Featured in this special collection are “Sisters,” “Scattershot,” in which the inhabitants of many universes meet in limbo, and Hardfought, which deserves more than passing mention. In Bear’s own words,

“Hardfought tells of a small portion in an eons-long war between humanity and the very ancient species of the Senexi. The narrative focuses on Prufax, a girl barely entering her adolescence, and Aryz, a Senexi whose job is to first understand humans and then, if successful, commit suicide. The violent coming together of these very different beings illustrates how understanding between humans and Senexi might be achieved and how such understanding could lead to peace.”

In response to intense fascination with the story, Bear prepared a Study Guide in BookRags, but you will benefit best from it after you read the story and its sisters. “Hardfought is very densely written, intense in action and theme, and it demands that readers think,” Bear advises. So, read it and come to your own conclusions before immersing yourself in the Study Guide.

The collection is available at once in paperback, and will soon be online for download, so revisit our site for updates, and check out the other superb works by this master science fiction storyteller for sale on E-Reads.

RC

Earlier this week we told you that Greg Bear’s Blood Music was back in paperback. Now it’s available as an e-book as well.

Here’s what we wrote about it.

Greg Bear didn’t invent the word “Nanotechnology”. But he did produce what is arguably the finest novel ever written incorporating the principle. E-Reads is proud to announce the rerelease in paperback of Blood Music.

In Blood Music, a rogue genetic engineer named Vergil Ulam has been freelancing work on a formula he discovered on his job at a research firm. When his employers discover his activities and order him to destroy the formula, he injects himself with it and walks off the job, having no idea of just how the concoction will affect him. What is far more ominous, he has no idea that his formula will have a profound effect on the world. Bear’s tale of scientific hubris takes you far beyond the boundaries of science fiction stories about the evils of uncontrolled science. Indeed, few authors could project their imaginations into the fantastic and exquisitely limned realm where Bear takes his readers.

E-Reads is the leading publisher of Greg Bear’s backlist. Check his author page for his novels and story collections. Some formats are still in production, so keep your eye peeled on our home page for updates.

RC

London’s Sunday Times carries a story asserting that Amazon’s UK management is making its staff work seven days a week or else. How do they know? It seems they planted an undercover reporter with co.uk after a temp ratted the employer out.

According to the story,

The reporter spent seven working days at Amazon’s warehouse in Bedfordshire as a packer after signing up with Quest Employment, an agency based in Northampton that supplies it with temporary staff. The reporter found that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker has a legitimate doctor’s note; sets quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as “ridiculous”; allows only one break of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes per eight-hour shift, with permission needed to go to the toilet.

Why employees need to go to the toilet was not made clear by the Times.

RC

Dana Goodyear’s “Letter from Japan” in The New Yorker’s end-of-year issue analyzes the Japanese craze for cellphone fiction. The stats make our own e-book business look positively anemic; one publisher alone carries one million “keitai shoshetsu” titles and receives 3.5 billion visits in a single month. Sales of one or two million hardcover reprints of cellphone novels are far from uncommon. “A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent,” writes Goodyear, who points out just how far the nation has come from “Tales of the Genji,” the earliest known novel written one thousand years ago.

We commented on this phenomenon a while ago (Cell Phone Fiction – Can 20 Million Japanese Be Wrong?) But this seems more than a mere craze. Reading Goodyear’s account, one feels as if one is watching the birth of a new form of communication or the violent formation of a volcanic island. One psychologist interprets it as an outburst of empowerment among long suppressed Japanese women, but concludes that “it just reinforces norms that are popular in male-dominated culture.” Whether it will carry to America’s shores will be interesting to find out.

(Tut-tut of the month to Goodyear for this solecism: “The Japanese publishing industry, which shrunk by more than twenty per cent over the past eleven years, has embraced cell-phone books.” Shrunk? I seldom nitpick grammar, for he who lives by the nitpick perishes by the nitpick. But this is The New Yorker, folks! Someone should have looked the usage up in – er – Shrunk and White.)

In any event, Goodyear’s article is a must-read for all seeking to know the shape of things to come.

RC