Did "The Jackal" lose his teeth? Or gain good terms for his authors? Or...

Clicking on the picture at the left gets you the original article on the Odyssey Edition, the title of which included an advisory to back up any e-books you bought from that set, because they were not likely to last long, and if you inadvertently deleted a copy thinking you could re-download it later, Amazon would no longer have it.

In fairness to Wylie, he did say that he mainly wanted to get Random House back to the table concerning author share of revenue from backlisted books.  And my guess is that he got some decent terms for his clients.
  For one thing, Random House was unsuccessful with their lawsuit against RosettaBooks LLC in 2001.  The press sees it as a total win for Random House, however, since there's no indication, so far, of any advantage gained for the authors.  Still, he earned his nickname, so I expect he got some concessions.

NPR's Associated Press story reports that Invisible Man, Rabbit Is Rich and 11 other works were being "removed" from the Odyssey set brokered between Wylie and Amazon that gave Amazon exclusive rights for two years.

Random House will publish the books on a "non-exclusive basis."

E-editions of seven works represented by Wylie, but first released by publishers other than Random House, including Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and William Burroughs' Junky, are still being sold exclusively through Amazon and released by Odyssey Editions.

Here's the press release released by Wylie and Random House's Chairman/CEO Markus Dohle:

' The Wylie Agency – Random House Joint Press Statement
August 24, 2010

"We are pleased to announce that The Wylie Agency and Random House have resolved our differences over the disputed Random House titles which have been included in the Odyssey Editions e-book publishing program. These titles are being removed from that program and taken off-sale. We have agreed that Random House shall be the exclusive e-book publisher of these titles for those territories in which Random House U.S. controls their rights. The titles soon will be available for sale on a non-exclusive basis through all of Random House's current e-book customers. Random House is resuming normal business relations with the Wylie Agency for English-language manuscript submissions and potential acquisitions, and we both are glad to be able to put this matter behind us."

--- Markus Dohle, Chairman & CEO, Random House
Andrew Wylie, President, The Wylie Agency LLC '

As I wrote in the original article on Wylie/Amazon:

' Be sure to do BACKUPS of these books
Hoyle adds, "His ambitions for the new publishing company are global but he also admits that he is happy to pull the plug on it if it frightens the publishers back to the negotiating table. 'It can be dismantled with the flick of a switch.'"

 This means that they could withdraw the e-books from the Amazon servers during any future negotiations with the publishers. '

It didn't take long, considering that some felt Amazon must have had some strong language in their Agreement with Wylie.

Here's the Wall Street Journal take on the turn of events.

The New York Times said that since mid July, Random House "has refused to acquire new books from the Wylie Agency and its more than 700 clients."

While Random House wouldn't disclose the financial terms of the agreement, the NYT writes that they "said they were consistent with agreements that Random House had reached with other literary agencies on backlist e-book rights."
  If so, that's not good news for authors.

The remaining seven books in the Odyssey Edition are by Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Norman Mailer, Oliver Sacks and Evelyn Waugh.

Futurebook.net notes those are not exactly safe either, as there will be negotiations on those.  They note he might have gotten some "really good terms" from Random House though.

  The Odyssey Edition books were still available from Amazon when they wrote the piece.
  And they still are, at the moment.  Some reading this blog article might want to get some of them instead of the coming Random House editions, although Random House is not part of the Big5 involved in the new Agency pricing.  They have had some higher pricing of their own though.  And these could be a form of digi-collectors' items someday :-).  More seriously, some have felt that $10 seemed high for backlist e-books.

Remaining Odyssey titles and their print publishers are:
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (UK print Penguin/US print publisher Penguin)
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (Everyman/Penguin))
Junky by William S Burroughs (Penguin/Penguin)
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins/HarperCollins)
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (HarperCollins/Picador)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks (Picador/Touchstone)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin/Back Bay Books)

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Kindle Newsbits 8-10-2010

KINDLE 3 SHIPPING DATES - AN AMAZON STATEMENT
Paul Biba at the excellent Teleread site alerts us to an email from Amazon's Director of Communications, Andrew "Drew" Herdener, to Examiner.com in response to customer reactions to various Amazon account messages (apparently, system glitches) advising that the new Kindles would be shipped in Sept-Oct.

  The Examiner reports:

' “Customers who placed an order before 8 pm PST on August 1st, their Kindles will still ship by the August 27th release date,” Herdener wrote, no doubt relieving plenty of customers who were able to pre-order their less expensive and now sold out Kindle models before the deadline.

Those who placed an order after that date should get them about a week later, says the site. '

As of Monday, Kindle customer reps were giving contradictory answers on shipping dates.  I'd go by the public statement Drew Herdener chose to make.

PROJECT GUTENBERG INTRODUCES A NEW MOBILE-DEVICE-OPTIMIZED SITE
James Adcock, who helped provide the Magic Catalog for Project Gutenberg book browsing and searching ON the Kindle and then downloading direct to the Kindle, has announced the new mobile version of the Project Gutenberg website, which is itself browsable from the Kindle, using the built-in experimental browser, if enabled for your country.  Direct download of Kindle-readable MOBI files to the Kindle carry no charges, as they don't go through the Amazon servers.

The URL or location address is http://m.gutenberg.org, and I'm glad to see the increasing number of worthwhile sites providing special mobile-device access versions of their pages.

DER SPIEGEL INTERVIEWS RANDOM HOUSE CEO MARCUS DOHLE ON PLANS FOR THE E-BOOK AGE, APPLE, AND THE PRINTED BOOK
Reader Dan Krodel alerts us to an interesting interview with the head of Random House which features the topics of Random House's "plans for the e-book age, the company's tough negotiations with Apple and why the printed book will continue to dominate publishing."

The questions are unusually blunt.  An example pops up right away, when asking Dohle about the skepticism surrounding his appointment 2 years ago: "Aren't you worried about embarrassing yourself while making small talk about literature with authors and agents?"  And that starts it off.  Dan Brown's marketing/networking instincts bring him into the picture right away also.

The interview is a good read and I highly recommend it.  I'll include here some of Dohle's thoughts on the changing world of books today.

  A bit of Amazon/Apple background.  Random House was the only one of the Big6 publishers to decline Steve Jobs's offer to do an Apple Agency Agreement that would prohibit other online bookstores from offering lower book prices than Apple's recommended higher pricing for/by publishers with 30% to Apple.  Since Random House did not think this wise for its own profitability in the U.S. market, their books are not eligible to be sold at the Apple's iBooks store in the U.S., even though they are the largest book publisher around.

Some thoughts by Dohle on the impact of e-books:

' I see myself as someone who has to strike a balance between creativity and profitability.  Of course, I read a lot more today, which is also because I always have my books with me, not always in printed form, but on my electronic reading devices.  I read whenever I have a few minutes to spare.
...
I'm pleased to see a reader who's reading on his iPad or Kindle.  Without these devices, perhaps we wouldn't be able to reach that person at that very moment, because he might have left his book at home. But we always have him on the electronic reader.  That minute of reading is a gift.

...I grew up with printed paper, but I have to admit that I'm surprised at how quickly the digital business is growing, especially in the United States.  Nevertheless, the printed book will still dominate for a long time to come.
...

[Re turnover from e-books]
  It's around 8 percent in the US right now, which represents a huge increase. I can imagine that we'll end up above 10 percent next year.
...

[On Amazon's announcement that it sold 180 digital titles for every 100 Amazon hardcover books in the U.S. and re analysts' estimate that in 10 years or so printed books will comprise only 25% of books sold]

  I don't agree with that prognosis. I think it's too aggressive, too much hype.  The market share for electronic books, even in the United States, will more likely be between 25 and 50 percent by 2015.  But this development still represents a huge opportunity for us.  It creates new growth.

  I meet people in America who say: I started reading again because of my e-reader -- and so did my children.

[Random House and Penguin are listening to readers.  Will Macmillan's Sargent?]

[On Random House's hesitation to partner with Apple's online iBookstore]

In the English-language market, unlike Germany, there is no such thing as a fixed book price agreement. The bookseller sets the retail price. In Apple's iBookstore, it's up to the publishers to set prices for the reader.  Apple stays out of it and gets a commission.  We have to examine this very closely to determine whether we are willing to make this drastic change to our business model. '

Dohle expands on all this, including his previously stated reasoning that booksellers have taken the risk in these markets and have experience in finding the right price points to reach as many readers as possible.  He explains:

'... it's also a question of the distribution of risk.  Until now, we have sold content, developed and marketed talent and calculated our prices accordingly.  In the United States, the book trade has structured retail prices in keeping with individual market conditions.  It needs to be determined whether publishers really can, and should, do both things in the future. '

SPIEGEL then asks Dohle, "Do you really believe you can do without Apple?"

And for Dohle's artful answer, in all fairness to the magazine, you'll need to go to the Der Spiegel site to read that.

He also comments on the possibility that much lower pricing devalues books and doesn't like seeing it taken to what publishers see as extremes, but he doesn't blame only the e-book movement.

It isn't as if pricing pressure only arose as a result of digital books.  It's just as prevalent in the print world.  Many countries don't have fixed book prices, and there we, as a publisher, have no influence on retail prices...
...
... it isn't always true that digital books are always cheaper than printed ones.  Sometimes printed books are sold for less at Wal-Mart, for example, than the digital version in an e-book store.

  In other words, there is no reason to claim that the digital business alone is ratcheting up pricing pressure in the book industry. '

Dohle also talks about the trend toward 'enhanced' books, using supplementary video, and wonders if readers are willing to pay more for those.

' ... the book as a medium is also changing. There are cookbooks that explain to you what to do in a video, or that dictate recipes out loud to you.  You don't even have to touch the iPad in the process.

  Still, no one knows whether this is something people really want and if they are prepared to pay a premium for it.

He also responds to questions about Amazon's own entry into publishing and its exclusives with authors who have been with the larger publishing houses and explains why he believes the authors will tend to stay with the publishing houses for the advantages they offer.

Here's the rest of the interview conducted by Markus Brauck and Isabell Hülsen.

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Check often:  Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.

Why the Agency plan worries Random House & why authors should worry

At Teleread (a great site to keep up with daily), this question was posed.
  Does Random House fear agency pricing because it gives authors too much information?

Two of us didn't think that was the reason.  The following is my response in connection with why Random House (at this time) appears to be avoiding Apple's Agency plan in favor of Amazon's traditional wholesaler plan which offers Amazon customers lower e-book pricing on NY Times bestsellers.

  (On the other hand, there's still time for Random House to change its mind for iPad-day tomorrow morning.)  Here's what I posted there in connection with why I think Random House is hesitating to sign up with Apple's iBookstore and why authors with other large publishing houses should be concerned too, no matter what their publishing houses tell them.

' It's so simple, and Random House sees it.

  For a $22 list price e-book (surprising how many are listed at that high a price), TRADITIONAL WHOLESALER arrangement usually gives publisher 50% of the publisher-set list price, or $11 in this case [from Amazon]. If Amazon sells the e-book at $10 Amazon takes a loss -- loss leader method.

Publisher gets more than [the $10] selling price to book-customers. It's a guarantee [of $11 for the publisher] even during special sales.

  Publisher and author still get $11 regardless of what the bookstore sells the book for.

  AGENCY: For a $22 e-book sold at $14 "Agent" gets 30% commission on fixed-price, or $4.20.

  Publisher gets $9.80 -- less money to give to the author.

  ($11 goes to publisher on the wholesale plan on a [$22 list-price-book even if it's sold as a] $9.99 book, which is more likely to sell than a higher-priced one.

  $9.80 goes to publisher on a $14 ebook NOT likely to sell and even if it does, there's less to give the authors.

  [The publisher] gets to say the e-book is more 'valuable' -

but, as mentioned, the customer is likely NOT going to buy the $14 e-book and so the publisher/authors get even less than that.

  Random House is not stupid. The examples are for the same e-book selling at (first) $10 under the wholesaler plan -- traditional -- and (second) at $14 under the new Agency plan.

 That's more like best scenario for the publisher using the agency plan -- they get even less when the book price IS reduced to $10 or $12. '

($7 or $8.40 instead of $11)

(Adding for the blog)
  The Big 5 publishers seem to hope people will decide to buy the hardcover books under that scenario -- more for almost the same price, on discounted hardcovers -- or at least easily pay the higher ebook price.
  They're in for a big surprise if so.

A new 99c Kindle book. Publisher says E-reader buyers can afford higher book prices.

New Kindle book offerings in the news - PR releases, maybe of interest:

Essondale - by Canadian psychiatrist and novelist David Laing Dawson.
  "Is this hell, or just a psychiatric hospital? Dr. Robert Snow isn't sure.  Waking from a drunken stupor in a small green room, the doctor finds he's on the other side of the diagnosis..."
  Description from PR release.  The book is a small one, at 207 KB file size, so you may want to get a free sample first.
  $0.99  (The paperback is $19.95 and a Used copy is offered for $29.)


Legion by UK Author B.J. Kibble
  Full description from PR release.
  His expensive paperpback, Dry Rain, has 4 customer reviews and 5-stars average from regular readers, so it may be worth trying a free sample of Legion.
  $5.56   (The paperback is $13.95.)

The Consumerist's Chris Walters reports on what a publishing industry expert advised in a piece about e-book pricing written last weekand and, worse, what he said about people who buy e-readers.

 Walters' article links to a summary of Professor (and publisher) Michael Cader's piece written for Publishers Lunch's paywall area.  The Consumerist article is quite long and interested readers ought to go there for the full piece and for the link to a summary at Idealog.com (which consults for the publishing industry), as it's too easy to take things out of context in a very polarized atmosphere.

  Having said that, I will quote a bit from Walters' piece to give the gist of the Consumerist response.

' Among [Cader's] advice to the industry is this one:

"People who can afford an ereading device can afford all proposed ebook prices."

By that, Cader means that it's unreasonable for a consumer to say he can't afford to pay more for an ebook.  Cader and other publishers may be justifiably upset that Amazon rolled their products up into its own marketing for the Kindle, but the truth is that there are plenty of customers who indeed bought a Kindle to save money over the long term.  The idea is to invest in a special device that can serve as the physical manifestation of any book you load onto it.

On a more basic level, what consumers are willing to pay for a device and what they're willing to pay for an ebook are two different matters and can't be compared.  But since Cader is doing so, let's take a look at them... [ A good listing ]
...
So you're right, publisher;  maybe I can afford to buy an ereader device.  That doesn't mean you can jack up the price on your crappy digital copy that currently offers less usefulness than a physical copy, and then hide behind the device's potential and cry, "I want to be treated like I make expensive baubles too!"  Because you don't.  You currently make poorly proofread digital files stripped of most of the qualities that make digital content awesome. '

Then Walters gives some great advice to publishers.

The next point is especially strong:

' For example, the fourth Twilight book came out in August 2008, but as of February 2010 the publisher feels the digital version should cost the same as the hardcover--an astounding $22.99.  (And yes, that publisher's owner is one of the companies arguing for more control over pricing.)

It's true that in the recent spat between Macmillan and Amazon, the publisher pointed out that it would price new releases at $15 or less--but based on past pricing patterns, there's no reason to believe that any publisher would subsequently drop the book to a $10 or less price point after it's been out for a while. '

Do go read this.  And, in the meantime, maybe write acknowledgement notes to Random House for supporting customers against the 'Agency' plan.
  Random House's imprints include Crown, Knopf/Doubleday, Ballantine, Bantam, The Modern Library, Fodor's Travel, and many others.   See the Kindle Community Forum topic for the full listing.

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LINKS FOR SEARCHING FOR FREE OR LOW-COST E-BOOKS
  As ever, here is the ongoing set of links for various Searches for free or low-cost Kindle-compatible books.

Random House OK w/ $9.99 books. What are Penny Dreadfuls?

RANDOM HOUSE SIDES WITH AMAZON AND KINDLE CUSTOMERS ON PRICING
Daithi, posted a report at MobileRead forums on statements by Madeline McIntosh, President of Sales, Operations and Digital for Random House, at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute meeting Feb 5.

On the subject of the Macmillan/Amazon conflict, she said that publishers "have no real experience at setting retail prices."  Daithi writes that she also revealed that one of the reasons Random House did not participate in the iPad iBookstore had to do with the pricing issues.

Daithi reported further that:

' In regards to delayed releasing of ebooks, McIntosh said, "Our current policy is we release e-books at the same time as physical books," followed by "I haven't been convinced that it's good for the author or consumer to delay the release. My fear is that the consumer who has fully embraced the technology will buy another e-book that is available or lose interest altogether. What if I train the consumer that the best scenario is to get it free?" '

He adds that McIntosh had worked for Random House for 18 years, left to work for Amazon less than 2 years ago as their Director of Kindle Content Acquisition for Europe, and Random House hired her back last year as President of Sales, Operations, and Digital.  While she may have had personal empathy with Amazon's position, Random House apparently agrees with her take.
  If only they were not usually choosing to disable the Kindle's impersonal-sounding text-to-speech feature, an action which is unfair to the vision-impaired.

E-BOOK PRICING:  IS LESS MORE?
In an interesting piece on how, to his "surprise," the Kindle became his "preferred reading mechanism for both periodicals and books" Robert Robb, a columnist for Arizona Republic, writes that he has doubts that the book publishers are reading the market and the potential of e-books correctly.  In his experience, at $10 a book, he's become "much more of an impulse buyer of books" and buys new books he has an interest in, at $10 but not at the list prices. In closing, Robb dispassionately (as opposed to vociferous forum discussions) describes a decision most of us have made and will be choosing more often after March:

' However, the difference between $10 and $15 seems to make the difference between an impulse buy by me and skipping it. I recently read a reference to a history of financial crises. It sounded interesting so I immediately went to the Kindle shop to see if it was available.  It was, but at $15.  At $10, I would have bought it.  At $15, I gave it a pass.

As a quantitative guy, I don't believe in reading much into anecdotal experience, even my own.  But I doubt that I'm alone.  The primary effect of e-books, if the pricing is gotten right, might be to substantially expand book sales, rather than shifting them between formats.

PENNY DREADFULS - WHAT ARE THEY?
Asked this the other day, I looked it up, having only a vague idea myself, and tweeted back "penny dreadfuls" were "dreadful," often "salacious" books priced low & quite popular. [For a fuller, more colorful description, see http://bit.ly/pdreadfuls]."

 These are books that will be offered by The British Library to Kindle owners, for free, along with the historically-accurate digital representations of first editions of more 'classic' books.  The Seattle PI newspaper has a long, detailed report by Nancy Mattoon on the penny dreadfuls, with sample books. Excerpts:

' Happily, along with the high class fiction, the UK library's freebies will also include the world's finest collection of cheap, tawdry, lowdown, lowbrow, Victorian trash. Get ready to heat up your cold Kindle with a torrid "Penny Dreadful."
. . .
If horror-master Stephen King fathered a child with "true crime" queen Ann Rule, and the kid became a comic book illustrator, you'd end up with a Penny Dreadful. The British version of a dime novel, these serialized stories were originally aimed at working class readers who couldn't afford the one shilling freight for mainstream monthly fiction produced by authors like Dickens. Instead of costing the equivalent of 12 pennies a month, these weekly cheapies gave avid readers of lurid tales a taste of their drug of choice for a penny a pop.
. . .
The most popular of the dreadfuls included highly glamorized sagas of real-life criminals like highwayman Dick Turpin, take-offs on folk heroes like Robin Hood, and horror variants like Varney the Vampire, an English version of Count Dracula.  The original Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was a character in one of Edward Lloyd's most successful weeklies, The String of Pearls. Another popular anti-hero was based on a London urban legend. "Spring Heeled Jack" was half-man, half-devil, with superhuman strength, and like a later pop culture icon, the "ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound." '

There's a lot more in the article, so if intrigued be sure to follow the link to the Seattle PI story.

Random House Releases Kindle & Hardcover "Lost Symbol" Together

Speakeasy's Jeffrey Trachtenberg (WSJ) writes " Kindle Averts Battle Over Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol.’

  ' Many publishers were eager to see if Random House would challenge Amazon’s strategy of pricing the book industry’s most successful titles at $9.99 for the Kindle e-reader by withholding the e-book edition of Dan Brown’s upcoming novel, “The Lost Symbol.” '

Random House is releasing the Kindle and hardcover versions simultaneously (coincidentally after much ado from customers about ignoring the hardcover edition if so, in which case there'd be less income from and less than excellent publicity for the book).  Random House claims that "security and logistical issues were resolved.

' Some in publishing suggested that Amazon might have responded by disengaging the “buy” button for the physical edition of Mr. Brown’s book. (An Amazon spokesman noted via email that the company has a “longstanding policy of not commenting on our interactions with publishers.”) '

Disabling of Text-to-Speech by Random House has begun

Bruce S. Woodcock has alerted us to a MobileRead Forum notice by KarlB that Random House (Knopf) has begun disabling the Kindle-2 text-to-speech feature, which is computerized speech that has almost no appropriate affect, often mispronounces words, and doesn't pause between paragraphs, headings, or chapters on its Kindle books - and it's unclear whether or not the author gets a choice in this disabling.

 The above link takes you to Bruce's announcement and the forum discussions on this.  While forum members are a small percentage of Kindle owners, they tend to know other Kindle owners and there has been a resulting resistance to Random House's policy, in the form of plans to not buy Random House Kindle books while they are doing this.  They also proposed using the Amazon tagging system to add a "No tts" tag to alert other customers to an author who chose disabling this feature.

The disabling of TTS on a book hurts the disabled most, since most Kindle owners use the computerized voice only for brief periods (while cooking or commuting in the car) and they don't buy the book to 'listen' to it, especially not via a monotone voice.

Does Random House appreciate the fact that the Kindle owner has purchased the book to read?  Do people who buy hardcopy books to read THEN go buy the audiobook ?  Where is their loss on this?  Kindle owners can't share their Kindle books except with someone ON their account, so just what is the problem for Authors Guild and Random House?

There is a Kindle book titled The Disabled Deserve to Read: The Controversy Over the Amazon Kindle's Voice, by Bufo Calvin, for 80 cents.
  The product description says: "The author's proceeds will go towards purchasing Kindles to donate to non-profit organizations."

  From what I remember, the Authors Guild has proposed tests they will put disabled people through to see if they 'qualify' for getting a computerized voice reading to them.  To me, there's something quite dark about that.
_______
  Related blog article on "Tom," the Kindle-2 voice