I fell in love with The Elegance of the Hedgehog on the first page after I looked up “eructaton” (burp or fart):  “There he stood, the most recent eructation of the ruling corporate elite–a class that reproduces itself solely by means of virtuous and proper hiccups.”  The book is told through the voice of Renee, the concierge of  a fashionable Paris apartment building (the quote is her description of a tenant), and Paloma, the 12 year old daughter of one of the tenants.  Both hide their intelligence and lead largely solitary lives, but discover one another when a new tenant, Ozu, arrives. 

Character development rather than plot moves the book forward.  Before Ozu arrives, Renee and Paloma judge their world quite harshly.  Both assume most people are dumb, Renee is bitter about the class structure that she works overtime to keep in place and Paloma finds life useless.  Ozu, as the new person in the building and a cultural outsider, sees them clearly for who they are.  Their relationship with him and each other gives them the security and space to stop hiding, both physically and figuratively.

Muriel Barbery’s only private west coast appearance will be at a National Endowment for the Arts benefit sponsored by Literary Affairs on Saturday, April 25th, the tickets are quite reasonable.  Book Soup will be donating 10% of its sales at the event to the NEA.  I’ll be there, let me know if you’re coming also.

Muriel Barbery weaves together threads of philosophy (I prefer reading about philosophy than actually reading it), the meaning of Art, literature (now I want to read Proust), music (a completely unique Mozart “Requiem” experience), film, Japanese culture, and descriptions of food that will make you salivate.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog requires thought from the reader, this isn’t a breezy read by the pool.  But, the pay off is well worth the effort.  In fact, I can honestly say that this is the best book I’ve read in three years and probably makes my top ten.

Hedgehog not only caused readers to fall in love with Renee, Ozu, Paloma and Ms. Barbery, but for the first time in my experience, I heard people talk about looking  for other books from Europa Editions, the publisher.  A girlfriend’s Facebook status update said “I loved The Elegance of the Hedgehog, now I’m going to look for other Europa books.”  Who ever read Updike and said “now I want to check out Ballentine Book’s catalogue?”  Europa Editions is a small publisher owned by an Italian couple, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, who founded Edizioni E/O, a publishing house in Rome that brings translated works to Italy.  Europa’s premise is to bring well-translated international books to the United States.  They pick the best books, find excellent translators (read Hedgehog with a dictionary by your side, it’s full of wonderful obscure words), and market through a combination of  independent booksellers, word of mouth and hand-selling.  The New York Times reported that this year Europa turned a modest profit, quite an accomplishment for 2008. Their biggest hit thus far is Hedgehog, which the Times said sold over 71,000 copies.  I looked at their catalogue and noticed Old Filth by Jane Gardam, another book that I loved.  Europa’s editorial discernment provides booksellers and readers with the assurance that the book is worth the time spent reading it.  The distinctive look of their books–all paperbacks with a clean cover design, front and back flaps, and their distinctive bird insignia–make them easy to find. 

My next Europa book is Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorioby Amara Lakhous, but I’ve realized that I need to read more translated books by living authors.  I would love recommendations, please provide some in the comments.

 My favorite take on the issue is David Pogue’s humorous battle between a Kindle2 and a book.  Mr. Pogue demonstrates each of their strentghs and argues that one won’t eliminate the other.

We’ve all seen firsthand how technological advances change the way we do things.   I haven’t made a phone call since the Internet was invented.  (Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but in my perfect world, I wouldn’t make anymore phone calls.)  Publishing is an old and established profession, but it’s not immune to technology’s advances.  I wrote an earlier post about electronic forms of books and whether their future is brighter (so to speak) than print.   But there are other ways that technology is changing the publishing world.

Recently, I was in New York and discussing my first book with someone in the publishing industry.  My first novel had a different publisher than my others and hadn’t sold very well (except oddly in France), so I was saying that I should try to get the rights back from the publisher and see if anyone might be interested in re-issuing it.  That was a possibility, the insider conceded, but, she added, these days the whole idea of a book’s being out of print has gotten a little fuzzy. 

The cause?  The ability to “print to order” which is becoming more and more widespread.  Kim discussed this in a previous post, focusing on how it might work for booksellers–at some point in the future, rather than having books in stock, a bookstore might have the capability to print a book when it’s ordered, thus sparing the owner the risk of ordering (and paying for) a book he might not sell.

Of course, that means that the book never officially goes out of print: any book could limp along for decades, still “listed” even if rarely ordered.  (This is true even if it’s the publishers and not the booksellers who are doing the printing, an ability that already exists today.) That’s good if you want a copy of it, bad if you’re the author and want the rights back.   At the very least, it blurs things a bit.

The same technology that allows printing to order makes self-publishing cheaper and more available than ever before.  In a recent New York Times article, Motoko Rich discusses the boom in the self-publishing industry.   Print to order technology means self-publishing authors no longer have to spend a fortune having a large initial run of their books made (often to languish unsold in boxes in their basements).  Instead, they can spend less money upfront, only printing as many copies as they can sell.  Online bookselling sites like Amazon offer a forum for self-published books that didn’t exist in previous eras.

One of the very first posts I wrote for my own blog was about how it feels like everyone out there in cyber space is writing–but was anyone reading what we were all writing?  Rich touches on the same point in her article: everyone wants to write books, but that doesn’t mean there’s an audience for all these extra books.  Even with the new technology, self-publishing probably works best for books you simply want to give to your friends and family; without a publishing house behind you, buying you table space and getting your books on the shelves in nationwide bookstores, it’s awfully hard to find readers.  (It’s been done–there are some notable exceptions, self-published books that have been huge hits.  But they’re rare exceptions.)

Of course, on some level, self-publishing is what Kim and I do every time we hit the “publish” button on a new post.  There’s something wonderfully liberating about writing whatever you want and putting it out there without any editorial interference or correction.  (And avoiding the whole “rejection letter” part of any process helps keep your ego healthy.)

According to Rich, an author can  upload a manuscript and for as little as  3 dollars, have a book of it printed up. 

The question seems to be: then what?

Or maybe the deeper question is: what makes a book a book?  The binding?  The quality of the words inside?  Whether it’s sold at your favorite independent bookstore? 

These are questions we’ll have to ask ourselves more and more now as technology makes it easier to print books–and our lifestyles and economy make it harder to sell them.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts about all this.

• HarperStudio is encouraging booksellers to buy the books on a nonreturnable basis by offering a large discount on these books
• Advances are lower to the author in exchange for a larger potential royalty
• People who buy the paper book with be given the option to buy it cheaply in downloadable audio and digital form so it can be read in all formats
• Marketing will concentrate on the Internet by using social networking, Twitter, related blogs and similar avenues

The debut book, Who is Mark Twain?, a compilation of previously unpublished stories, will be out on  April 21st.  Six of the stories are unfinished, so there will be a “I am the Next Mark Twain” writing contest allowing the entrants to finish a story.  I’m looking forward to that!

Peter Osmos writes in “Who Says the Book Business is Dead?”that this round of digital readers are the beginning of a new way to receive and read  books.  He believes digital readers work for books (and will work better and cheaper with innovation), but they aren’t as effective for newspapers and magazines.  Moreover, audible reading is taking hold as people are listening to more written word content, “Earbuds are everywhere, and by no means are all of them blaring music.” 

In “An Autopsy of the Book Business” by Jason Epstein, he traces the decline of book publishing to the population shift from cities to the suburbs.  When people congregated in cities, there were independent bookstores with extensive backlists and publishers that printed those books.  When people moved to the suburbs, these stores didn’t have enough traffic to survive with huge backlists, nor were there enough customers in the suburbs to support this type of bookstore.  So, bookstores stopped ordering books from backlists and both publishers and bookstores began to rely on the blockbuster novel for sales and profits.  (Read the recent WSJ article on why publishers will continue to pay huge advances for “blockbuster’ books.  It uses the cat book Dewey as an example.)  He points out that it is exactly these “backlist books” that provide personal insight and wisdom,  ”Would the American economy have collapsed if the casually educated caretakers of our treasure and good name who wasted our wealth on the assumption that greed is self-regulating had read those great conservative skeptics of human nature, Gibbon, Hobbes, Smith, and Burke, or studied the wisdom of our country’s founders?”  One commenter also suggested reading the Bible for learning that nothing is new under the sun.

Mr. Epstein said that publishers started to strive for a level of profit that isn’t possible in this business.  He sees the future in digital readers and on-demand printers that cheaply print and bind books “wherever electricity and the Internet exist.”  What will be important with so much content easily accessible are people to filter and evaluate what is worth spending a few hours reading.

So how should booksellers respond?  A recent post on Booksellers Blog asked exactly that and the discussion it generated is interesting to follow.  Several variations on the theme of bookstores having some sort of download equipment that allowed e-readers to buy a book with a cut going to the bookstore.  Another suggestion is the on-demand printer that would allow a bookstore to order up a book and print it in the store.  All realized the value in shopping for a book in a bookstore, seeing books and having discussions with the staff about recommendations, the question is how to retain those benefits in a changing world. While I don’t know the answer, in fact, probably no one has foreseen how bookstores will change in response to the e-reader, I am more than heartened by an attitude of meeting the challenge rather than being defeated by it.

Maybe next year these clever people will figure how to set this to music and pitch it to Schoolhouse Rock.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve come across or been sent some interesting articles about publishing and writing books, and since a lot of the issues raised are ones Kim and I have touched on in previous posts (like this one, about the demise of publishing), I wanted to share them with you all.

David Streitfeld had a piece in The New York Times over winter break that relates to the ongoing discussion Kim and I have been having about the morality of buying used books (see our previous posts about it).  In the piece, entitled Bargain Hunting for Books and Feeling Sheepish about It, Streitfeld essentially blames the decline of the independent bookstore and possibly the entire publishing industry on the habits of readers–like himself–who lazily buy the cheapest copies of books they can find on the Internet (new or used) and  also on those who resell the books they’ve read right out of their homes.

He writes:  “One consequence  [of how easy it is to buy and sell used books online] has been to change the calculations involved in buying a book. Given the price, do I really want to read this? Now it’s become both an economic and a moral issue?  How much do I want to pay, and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author? In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.”

As much as we and our readers love our local indies, I think we can all relate to that moment of compromising our moral integrity to save a few bucks (or, in my case, to save the need to drive somewhere: it’s so damn easy to click to buy!).  Anyway, we’ve covered some of this before, as I’ve said, so if you’re interested, click back to some of our past posts about used books and the (alleged) demise of publishing (like the ones I highlighted above) and read all of Streitfeld’s piece.  At the very least, it may make you think twice before you buy a used book for one penny from an online seller.  (Side note: check out the cost of mailing before you pat yourself on the back for that one penny “bargain.”  I’m just saying.)

The other link I want to share comes from the Blog Editor at Beacon Press, a small press in Boston that I happen to love because one of my closest friends has worked there for decades and that Kim happens to love because they publish incredibly thoughtful and thought provoking books.  Let me just quote for a moment from the Beacon Press mission statement:  “The mission of Beacon Press is to affirm and promote these principles: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in society; the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence; and the importance of literature and the arts in democratic life.”

It’s my tendency in life to be skeptical, but from what I know of Beacon’s book lists, they genuinely hew to their mission and publish books that are meaningful and positive and inspiring.  (And, no, they’re not paying us to say that.  In fact, no one is paying us for anything we put on this blog, but if someone wants to START, I’m very easily bought.  Kim has higher principles, so she’s probably more expensive.)

Anyway, the editor of the Beacon Broadside sent me a link to a blog they posted recently, by Jeremy Adam Smith, author of the upcoming The Daddy Shift (yes, from Beacon Press).   In a way, this post is an antidote to the depressing and all-too-relatable concerns that Streitfelt put forward in his piece.  It’s Smith’s response to someone who asks him, basically, why bother to write books when the people you want to have read them probably never will?  Isn’t it ultimately an exercise in futility?

I’ll let you read Smith’s thoughtful response , because I probably wouldn’t do it justice, but one of his main points is that books are the jumping off point for discussions that continue in many venues and throughout many different media, so even when a book isn’t widely read, its message may still be heard.  He also touches on the pleasures of simply being an author–even if the monetary rewards aren’t great–and the persistent hope that something you’ve written will touch the mind of a reader in such a way that you might change his or her way of thinking forever.

(Me, I just want to get on the bestseller list and maybe have a TV movie made of my novels–but I’ve never been much of a deep thinker. )

Anyway, read these articles and let us know what you think of them.  And if you know of any other great pieces about publishing, writing or selling books, pass them on to us.  We love sharing.

Tom Engelhardt surveys recent events

Tom Engelhardt, author (including the novel The Last Days of Publishing), editor, Fellow at The Nation Institute and founder of TomDispatch.com, wrote a post summarizing specifically how the publishing industry is slashing and cutting its staff and book lists, bookstores are sending an increasing percentage of book orders as “returns,” and the reading population is changing.  He offers interesting insights into why publishers have been shielded from the Internet onslaught until recently.  Primarily, books don’t promote advertising, so they were ignored and escaped the problems of competing with online alternatives to newspapers and magazines.  That could be changing with the advent of e-readers.  He does suggest that reading electronically will probably include an advertising angle sometime in the future.  The Internet has changed book reading though by offering a cheap alternative, Mr. Engelhardt notes that a month of Internet service with all it offers is about the same price as a paperback or hardback.  Reading isn’t the cheapest entertainment any longer. 

Pat Holt had pointed suggestions for the publishing industry

Pat Holt is our new found hero.  Book editor and critic for many years at the San Francisco Chronicle, author and board member of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, she has a long list of impressive accomplishments; however, here’s what we love:

Increasingly concerned about the plight of independent bookstores in their struggle to survive wave after predatory wave of chain bookstores, price clubs, discounters and Internet retailers, Pat resigned from The Chronicle in 1998 to create “Holt Uncensored,” an email book column launched by the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Now published from the Holt Uncensored website, the column became a full-fledged blog in 2008.

If that’s not the action of a modern day hero, what is?   Ms. Holt wrote a series on her website about the publishing industry called Three Things I’d Like to See.  The first recommends that publishers have online royalty accounts for authors (this didn’t resonate well with the publishers).  I asked Claire recently how her book was selling, she said she didn’t have any idea, she only hears if it will be reprinted.  I was stunned, my lawyer side kicked in and asked how she would know if she was getting the correct royalties, she just said that’s not how it’s done.  Clearly, authors need a union.

The second post suggested that publishers leave New York, cross not only the Hudson River but the Mississippi River as well.  As a native Californian, I couldn’t agree more.  I don’t think my kids have to go to college on the east coast any more than they should go to college in the mid-west.  In fact, I think only Californians should teach California history (yes, I know there are legal issues) because I’m so sick of non-natives teaching it with disdain.  I love visiting New York, but it isn’t the center of the world and the population needs to get over itself.  Okay, that’s a personal rant.  Ms. Holt’s very professional post discusses why it’s crippling the industry to be so insular.  She argues that its exclusive nature encourages reporting that is more about the author’s life than the author’s product.  She also discusses the National Book Award presentation night fiasco and how the National Book Foundation could better spend its funds to promote authors.

The last post highlights the problems with the decreasing power of editors in the publishing industry.  Ms. Holt finds the root of the problem with the marketing department having too much of a say in which books are chosen for publication.  Rather than allowing an editor to independently chose books, the race is for the next big author in whatever niche is selling at the time: romance novels in the 1980s, then Tom Clancy’s technical military books, and currently, but hopefully subsiding, quest books a la Dan Brown.  What she didn’t mention in this post, but which I have said so many times this year when I’ve finished a book, is “this would be a great book if it was 100 pages shorter, where was the editor?” I can think of at least five books I’ve read in the last year that didn’t have a story line or a purpose that supported its physical heft.

So we end the year with foreboding for the industry.  One of the aspects I like about Tom’s piece is that it compares what is going on in this industry with the automobile debacle and that helps give the situation a little perspective.

There has been a flurry of stories about the demise of the book and book selling the last few weeks.  First electronic readers and digitized books, then the lay offs and salary freezes by the publishing houses, followed by the re-organization of Random House, all the events have people wondering if the recession will devastate the industry. 

A recent story on NPR listed the doom and gloom of publishing and hinted at ways it may change.  Books are the only products that can be returned for a full credit if they don’t sell. Remember the notices on books that you should never buy a book without a cover?  That’s because instead of shipping the entire book back to the publisher, only covers would be shipped with the understanding that the book would be thrown away.  The bookstore received a credit for the unsold books that were returned via the cover, to then sell such a book would be ‘double dipping.’  The return practice may die in the recession. 

On the other hand, small presses are surviving.  No one is making a fortune and the blockbusters aren’t usually coming from these houses, but quality literature is being published.  I’ve talked to several authors who have enjoyed working with smaller publishers because of the care and attention given to their books.

Book

Is the book as we know it becoming extinct?

Well, some may be.  Who owns a set of encyclopedias?  When my children look up a word, they head to the computer, not the gigantic dictionary I have beautifully laid out for their easy use.  An essay in the  NYT Book Review and then an Op-Ed in the NYT on the same day talked about how reference books are being replaced by easily obtained and heft-free electronic sources.  But it is difficult to envision cuddling up with an electronic reader; I’ve tried and failed.  After working with a screen all day, I want my novels on real paper. 

Bookstores

While bookstores are certainly closing, note Duttons in LA and Olsson’s in DC, and it is a precarious business, locally two new bookstores have opened and a third expanded.  Stories, a new bookstore in Echo Park, opened last month.  Diesel, which already has two bookstores, one in Malibu and another Oakland, opened a third store in Brentwood this fall.  Skylight Books in Los Angeles took over the store next door and expanded. 

Moreover, booksellers nationwide are certainly not going down without a fight.  The American Booksellers Association (ABA) recently started IndieBound, a community oriented movement to buy from independent retailers, notably booksellers. 

When money is tight there is a pull to spend less and to create a community sense that we are all in this together.  Those feelings can be in conflict when trying to decide whether or not to buy books from a discounter or an independent bookstore that can’t offer the same low price (although ask, you never know).  In my opinion, the difference in price is more than made up for by supporting the nurturing of authors and customers that occurs in our local stores.  I hope the rest of the country agrees with me.