Named a Best Book of 2011: Engle­wood Review of Books and Hearts & Minds Books

“I read it in three sit­tings. Then I read it again. It’s a beau­ti­ful book, eas­ily my favorite book on writ­ing since Bird by Bird.”

—author Kim­ber­lee Con­way Ireton

Find out more on Ama­zon and down­load a sam­ple to your Kindle.

Saints pre­serve us, the Bezosian Beelze­bub has struck again, this time spin­ning his stink­ing seduc­tions, pants on fire, in the High Street, itself.

Publishing’s pun­ditti and free-range blog­gers have been on over­drive since Mon­day, of course, heav­ing their loud­est lamen­ta­tions back and forth across the Atlantic over the news that the UK bricks-and-mortar book­store chain Water­stones has made a deal to sell Kindles.

Water­stones / Image: paidContent

In fact, let’s stop right there, get up, and run around the room for a good 45 to 60 sec­onds before con­tin­u­ing. Rejoin me here after you’ve taken your Indig­na­tion Lap.

OK, good, wel­come back.

It’s bad enough for lots of folks to have thought Water­stones was get­ting cozy with Barnes and Noble about the Nook, only to find that Lucifer’s Own eReader is actu­ally the con­quer­ing device.

But what’s worse, the company’s man­ag­ing direc­tor, James Daunt, maybe he was Water­stoned at the time, did this deal with Ama­zon with­out call­ing up each of our com­men­ta­tors first for his or her permission.

Unthink­able cheek! We are beside our­selves. An arrange­ment to offer hand­guns for sale in the front win­dows of the bookseller’s more promi­nent loca­tions may have gone down much more eas­ily than this blast of blasphemy.

Why the Waterstones/Amazon deal could hurt Water­stones — paid­Con­tent http://t.co/n2yz997E

Thurs­day 24 May 12 04:00 via BufferReplyRetweetFavorite

@turndog_million

Turn­dog Millionaire

To be sure you catch the acrid air of sheer dis­gust here, I offer you a round of head­lines. Sit well back from your screen, safety first.

Water­stones Let The Fox Into The Chicken Run. That one is Mar­tyn Daniels at The­Fu­ture­Book, who, in fact, comes back for a sec­ond day, still fum­ing, with: Water­stones: Kiss­ing Their Cus­tomers Good­bye.

Daunt dances with the devil. That’s our good col­league Philip Jones at The­Fu­ture­Book, ref­er­enc­ing a phrase that has come to rather haunt Daunt — no extra charm for the rhyme. Ah, dis­tinctly I remem­ber, it was in the bleak Decem­ber that Daunt was quoted as say­ing, “Ama­zon are a ruth­less, money-making devil, the consumer’s enemy.”

(Yanks: The Brits refer to com­pa­nies in the plural. So “Ama­zon are” to them is “Ama­zon is” to us. Daunt may have dis­par­aged his future dance part­ner, but he didn’t mis­take a fox­trot for a square dance, as it might seem to US sensibilities.)

Still wait­ing for indie book­sellers to declare AMZN/Waterstones the devil’s work and for the AAP and AG to sue some­one, anyone.

Mon­day 21 May 12 10:42 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

Author Nick Hark­away went for the Huston-Eastwood treat­ment on his first pass, The Unex­pected. Then he cir­cled back again — and another thing, damn it — for Day Two, a bit more begrudg­ing, maybe: Waterstones/Amazon: Clever, But Scary.

@thDig­i­tal­Reader @Don­Linn @mike­cane Water­stones could be Pot­ter­more, mul­ti­ple devices, mul­ti­ple for­mats, but sadly that is not the deal here

Mon­day 21 May 12 10:42 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@philipdsjones

Philip Jones

Even the dean of our com­men­ta­tors, Mike Shatzkin, couldn’t tem­per the sur­prise fac­tor, get­ting out a fast turn head­lined Shock­ing news from the UK: Water­stones sell­ing the Kin­dle.

So look, I’ve also selected for you the lilt­ing tack taken by some­one we don’t so fre­quently hear from in these tus­sles, a UK writer for CNET named Luke West­away.

You have to love his head­line: Water­stones to sell Ama­zon Kin­dle in pos­si­bly unwise move. May I ever-so-sweetly sug­gest that we all could take a gen­tle les­son from Friend West­away about not over­stat­ing what we know in our headlines?

(Mike Cane, my good buddy, I’m talk­ing to you, with your Water­stones Talks Big Then Sur­ren­ders To Ama­zon head­line. And your first line: “Here’s a les­son for you, kids. Just STFU or this can be you!” I don’t know why, but the word “intem­per­ate” just keeps com­ing to mind, crazy, huh?)

Here’s West­away:

Water­stones pri­mar­ily sells books made of mushy tree, so you’d think it would be less keen on the idea of invit­ing the all-consuming dig­i­tal com­pany into its brick-and-mortar shops. I’ve tried to puz­zle out a way the move could help Water­stones, but this does feel rather like the three lit­tle pigs offer­ing to pay for the wolf’s deep breath­ing classes.

Thank the Lord some­body in the Sceptered Isle still can do that with the language.

In fact, West­away goes so far as to offer you the Water­stones video in which James the Reviled tries to say some­thing for him­self about his “curi­ous move” (Westaway’s phrase). I’m embed­ding the tape — with its twinkly love-of-books music, sounds as if Jo Rowl­ing is just around the next stacks — so you can enjoy it for your­self and at least let Daunt plead his case.

The point West­away is mak­ing, how­ever elo­quently, is right. Crown­ing the Water­stone embrace of Amazon’s Kin­dle “fam­ily” is this thing of, as Hark­away puts it, “the gold­fish offer­ing to clean the cat’s teeth with his head.”

Remem­ber Bor­ders. Here is Laura Haz­ard Owen in her own sec­ond pass at the story, Why the Waterstones/Amazon deal could hurt Water­stones:

Water­stones’ out­sourc­ing of its dig­i­tal shop­ping expe­ri­ence to Ama­zon is rem­i­nis­cent of the deal that the now-defunct U.S. book­store chain Bor­ders made with Ama­zon in 2001. By the time Bor­ders ended that deal six years later, it had lost years of man­ag­ing its own dig­i­tal strat­egy and placed its cus­tomers right in Amazon’s hands. As a for­mer Bor­ders employee told Bloomberg last sum­mer when Bor­ders liq­ui­dated its remain­ing stores, Bor­ders “ended up being a customer-harvesting vehi­cle for Amazon.”

That ques­tion of seem­ingly hand­ing over the dig­i­tal cus­tomer base of Water­stones to Seat­tle is, far and away, the most troubling.

Water­stones: Kiss­ing Their Cus­tomers Good­bye | Future­Book http://t.co/2mXrOGAd

Thurs­day 24 May 12 02:00 via BufferReplyRetweetFavorite

@cathryanhoward

Cather­ineRyan­Howard

Hark­away, in his second-day take on the mat­ter, gets at it this way:

One major issue has begun to loom larger in my think­ing …and that is the impact of Water­stones’ ded­i­cated heavy read­ers con­vert­ing to ded­i­cated dig­i­tal read­ers on Amazon’s plat­form. The sales those ded­i­cated heavy read­ers drove will be lost to Waterstones.

But, as Shatzkin points out, in agree­ment with Owen, there are ques­tions, too, of how the deal ben­e­fits Water­stones finan­cially. He writes:

Michael Cader in Pub­lish­ers Lunch reads the press releases the same way I do and we both get the mes­sage that the only ebooks Water­stones will share rev­enue on are those that are pur­chased over Water­stones’ in-store wifi network.

And Cader, in that arti­cle, Water­stones In “Far-Reaching” Alliance with Ama­zon to Sell Kin­dle, gets at some­thing a lot of us noticed — word of the deal came right atop a fea­ture in the Guardian. Here’s Cader:

Hav­ing walked into a puff piece over the week­end claim­ing Water­stones’ dig­i­tal ini­tia­tive would be “immi­nent” and quot­ing Daunt say­ing, “We’ll be dif­fer­ent from Ama­zon, and we’ll be bet­ter” (while bizarrely imply­ing that pub­lish­ers are sin­is­ter mas­ter­minds behind “the semi-corrupt prac­tice” of mak­ing books return­able), the Guardian repents today with a head­line that reads, “Water­stones Kin­dle a deal for destruc­tion with Amazon.”

That “deal for destruc­tion” piece is a blog post at the Guardian, from Richard Lea, and freighted, like so many writes on the topic, with opin­ion. It’s worth not­ing Lea’s first line, cun­ningly redo­lent with the indus­try! the indus­try! hysteria:

Mon­day morn­ing and already it’s the end of the world.

Water­stones’ dig­i­tal dilemma is mostly fault of pre-Daunt man­age­ment, but Daunt will for­ever be remem­bered for doing deal with Amazon

Tues­day 22 May 12 08:39 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@arhomberg

Andrew Rhomberg

The Guardian’s set piece is from Zoe Wood, the paper’s retail writer, stead­ier as she goes, in Water­stones deal with Ama­zon puts Kin­dle and ebooks instore. You can hardly ask for a more restrained line than this:

Ama­zon is a con­tro­ver­sial player in the book indus­try with both pub­lish­ers and retail­ers com­plain­ing that its aggres­sive pric­ing is under­min­ing the suc­cess of the whole industry.

Wood does get the job done with an impor­tant point the more emo­tional writ­ers tend to over­look, one that helps explain the tenor of the UK reac­tion to all this:

Last month the Guardian reported that Amazon.co.uk paid no cor­po­ra­tion tax on the prof­its gen­er­ated by last year’s UK sales of £3.3 bil­lion – and is under inves­ti­ga­tion by the UK tax authorities.

Never a screamer, Eoin Pur­cell in Dublin does, at this writ­ing, have two rounds of com­men­tary out on the sit­u­a­tion already, yes, but as usual he man­ages to work in some thought­ful per­spec­tive worth tak­ing onboardl. In Thoughts On » Water­stones & Ama­zon:

The value of inac­tion is often under­es­ti­mated and right now when the ebook retail and dis­tri­b­u­tion space is chang­ing rapidly and requires such a huge invest­ment, this move brings rev­enue, options but most cru­cially of all, time to just see what hap­pens while rebuild­ing the core book­selling busi­ness. Impressed by the cojones if noth­ing else!

Matt Gart­land has cre­ated another of his “In Three Words” series, this one look­ing at the future of jour­nal­ism. / At WinningEdits.com

As it turns out, a write that’s been favor­ably com­mented on by sev­eral folks comes from Tim Car­mody at the Verge. It’s head­lined Amazon’s Kin­dle deal with Water­stones deflates Nook’s global bal­loon – hysteria-free, you notice, plus it takes the story a step far­ther, to make us think, “Oh, yeah, what about Barnes and Noble and the Nook?”

Car­mody takes the time to lis­ten to a bit of Daunt-running-the-gauntlet, enough at least to catch and high­light for us this line:

“We had to give the cus­tomers what they wanted”

That hits some­where near home in an indus­try try­ing to con­vince itself that the reader is our cus­tomer. So Car­mody has gone about get­ting our atten­tion with an unstated reminder of a newly pro­mul­gated prin­ci­ple. Then he reminds us that the Kin­dle is the reign­ing ereader at the home office:

Water­stones would effec­tively have to build the Nook e-reader brand up from scratch…Right now and for the imme­di­ate future, Amazon’s Kin­dle is the best viable candidate.

For its part, Car­mody writes, Ama­zon needs a way to roll out the Kin­dle fam­ily of devices since only the basic Kin­dle is in wide­spread use yet in the UK. And Water­stones is a known, home-rule fixture.

Water­stones now becomes Amazon’s friendly British face. That’s well worth a small cut of e-books and e-readers sold inside Water­stones’ shops.

Best line in this story goes to For­rester ana­lyst @smulpuru: “Ama­zon doesn’t want to be anyone’s bitch.” http://t.co/AYRMFecU

Wednes­day 23 May 12 05:26 via Yoru­FukurouReplyRetweetFavorite

@tcarmody

Tim Car­mody

And best in class? For an infor­ma­tive and well-crafted write, see the work of Tim Brad­shaw and Andrea Fel­sted in Lon­don with Bar­ney Jop­son in New York for the Finan­cial Times.

Their story has the bonus of an object les­son in how to write a clean head­line: Water­stones strikes deal with Ama­zon. They quote Daunt:

“Our prob­lem was that the part of the mar­ket being served by high-street book­shops is in decline and we have to do some­thing about it…We are in the busi­ness of sell­ing reading.”

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.

Good morn­ing, every­one. Did some­thing hap­pen with Water­stones and Ama­zon last night? If only my Twit­ter feed was men­tion­ing this…

Mon­day 21 May 12 10:51 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Gin­ger Clark

By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From May 17, 2012

Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days at the invi­ta­tion of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

Named a Best Book of 2011: Engle­wood Review of Books and Hearts & Minds Books

“I read it in three sit­tings. Then I read it again. It’s a beau­ti­ful book, eas­ily my favorite book on writ­ing since Bird by Bird.”

—author Kim­ber­lee Con­way Ireton

Find out more on Ama­zon and down­load a sam­ple to your Kindle.

The Dance Darkens

The class-action suit in ques­tion is the one brought by a num­ber of US states, filed on the same day (April 11) as the Depart­ment of Justice’s own action against the com­pa­nies. The num­ber of states involved in the class has since bal­looned from 16 to 31.

Jacqui Cheng, writ­ing from the Ars Tech­nica van­tage point in Judge: Ample evi­dence that Apple “know­ingly joined” e-book con­spir­acy, looks first, of course, for the tech-defendant’s posi­tion after Tuesday’s U.S. Dis­trict Court opinion.

Not a pretty sight. Cheng’s second-deck headline:

Apple hasn’t been found guilty yet, but the judge’s com­ments don’t bode well.

DOJ Law­suit Update: Where Win­dow­ing Becomes Impor­tant http://t.co/F3XdGjLt by @jane_l #TOCCN #Fol­lowReader

Wednes­day 16 May 12 14:31 via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@toc

Tools of Change

Ali­son Frankel at Reuters Legal is even clearer in her head­line: Rul­ing in ebooks class action is blow to defense in DoJ antitrust suit. Frankel writes:

The pub­lish­ers were hop­ing that the class action didn’t meet the high plead­ing stan­dard for antitrust com­plaints under the U.S. Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, but (US Dis­trict Court Judge Denise) Cote found there were plenty of the spe­cific, well-supported alle­ga­tions of col­lu­sion that Twombly demands.

Jim Mil­liot at Pub­lish­ers Weekly head­lined his story with as lit­tle emo­tion as pos­si­ble: Court Rejects Motions to Dis­miss Class Action Against Apple, Pub­lish­ers. He main­tained an admirable level of restraint through­out his write:

In her deci­sion to let the civil suit move into the dis­cov­ery phase, Judge Cote wrote that the suit “plau­si­bly alleges that Apple and the Pub­lisher Defen­dants took part in a con­spir­acy in restraint of trade, that an object of this con­spir­acy was to raise prices for eBooks, and that this restraint was unrea­son­able per se.”

Judge Cote had, as Mil­liot wrote, “rejected all of Apple and the pub­lish­ers’ argu­ments to dismiss.”

ugly “truth” about how agency pric­ing came to be — it blows your mind; this is not clu­bish­ness, this IS col­lu­sion #in http://t.co/SfxnTYAO

Wednes­day 16 May 12 07:07 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@arhomberg

Andrew Rhomberg

Judge comes down hard on pub­lish­ers, Apple in e-book case, wrote paidContent’s Jeff John Roberts.

Cote’s opin­ion is at times remark­able for the emphatic lan­guage in which she decries the alleged conspiracy.…(Her) opin­ion is at times remark­able for the emphatic lan­guage in which she decries the alleged conspiracy.

Roberts adds:

Three of the pub­lish­ers (Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon & Schus­ter) have already set­tled an antitrust law­suit with the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and agreed to change their pric­ing prac­tices. The three pub­lish­ers are also in nego­ti­a­tions with state gov­ern­ments under which they are likely to pay tens of mil­lions in con­sumer resti­tu­tion. In plain Eng­lish, this means that peo­ple who bought an e-book in the last few years may receive a small set­tle­ment payment.

Why does Judge Denise Cote want to give the future of pub­lish­ing to Ama­zon? http://t.co/ytJbIjhg via @drmabuse @Sheryl­Nan­tus

Wednes­day 16 May 12 12:31 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@RavenRequiem13

PW Creighton

Robert’s paid­Con­tent col­league Laura Haz­ard Owen looked over the states’ amended com­plaint paper­work and found that por­tions that had been redacted in April (for unknown rea­sons) now has been left vis­i­ble. Her write is head­lined As 17 more states join class action against book pub­lish­ers and Apple, new details revealed.

For exam­ple:

“The Club”: In Sep­tem­ber 2009 as the pub­lish­ers con­sid­ered “win­dow­ing,” or stag­ger­ing the print and dig­i­tal releases of a book, they “ref­er­enced them­selves in one email as ‘the Club!’” This was in ref­er­ence to win­dow­ing dis­cus­sions and not to agency pric­ing dis­cus­sions with Apple.

@Porter_Anderson Because they couldn’t remem­ber the word ‘car­tel’ at the time?

Mon­day 14 May 12 16:31 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

Indeed, much of the “stu­pid DoJ!” crowd noises that had fol­lowed the orig­i­nal fil­ing in April were miss­ing this week. An email list or two had a few spir­ited exchanges, but with­out the feisty, devil-may-care, you-call-that-collusion? wit we’d seen for a month. Some called the newly revealed bit of the com­plaint in Owen’s story “damn­ing.” Oth­ers took issue with the term.

More fuss, less debate, this time. #haha at best. No #hahaha’s to be heard. It got more seri­ous this week.

And Michael Cader at Pub­lish­ers Lunch wrapped some pretty painful sobri­ety in the  grace of clar­ity. In Judge Cote Rejects Motions to Dis­miss Agency Class Action Suit; Shows Sym­pa­thy for the Plain­tiffs, his rea­soned, help­ful assessment:

The ini­tial read of Tuesday’s rul­ing can only give encour­age­ment to the plain­tiffs and pause to the defen­dants (and their defend­ers) at this stage, as Judge Cote con­fi­dently swats away all of the argu­ments made by the defen­dants in their dis­missal motions.

Cader went even fur­ther, in order to assist book-biz observers parse legal implications:

Some peo­ple in the book indus­try won­dered how a case could be built around mostly cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence and infer­ences, but Judge Cote writes that since “unlaw­ful con­spir­a­cies tend to form in secret, such proof will rarely con­sist of explicit agreements.”

Indeed, Cader explained, Cotes has gone to some length on the lay assump­tion that cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence might be inadequate.

She (Judge Cote) cites case law that indi­cates “the antitrust plain­tiff should present direct or cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence that rea­son­ably tends to prove that the [defen­dant] and oth­ers had a con­scious com­mit­ment to a com­mon scheme designed to achieve an unlaw­ful objective.”

Thirty-one states are now suing Apple and pub­lish­ers over ebook pric­ing http://t.co/BgFpy7LO

Tues­day 15 May 12 09:30 via Hoot­SuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@NiemanLab

Nie­man Lab

The dance being cel­e­brated in Mon­te­v­ideo in our lead Ether image above is a tango, “La cumpar­sita.” You’d know it if you heard it. The 95th anniver­sary of this work by Ger­ardo Matos Rodriguez — orig­i­nally a car­ni­val march — arrived on April 19. Our photo was taken at an event held on the site of the song’s orig­i­nal per­for­mance, at a cafe, La Giralda.

The tango’s open­ing lyric, by Pas­cual Con­tursi, seems to speak to how things felt this week in our unhealthy indus­try. In one translation:

The masked parade
of end­less mis­eries
prom­e­nades
around that sick being…

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.

As 17 more states join e-book class action, prev. redacted details revealed–including Steve Jobs e-mail & B&N deets http://t.co/6ZzMAdRJ

Mon­day 14 May 12 16:12 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@laurahazardowen

Laura Haz­ard Owen