From April 12, 2012

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

The mon­sters we create

What other indus­tries per­mit agency pric­ing? In what other sec­tor do you find man­u­fac­tur­ers set­ting the prices and retail­ers hav­ing to, essen­tially, like it or lump it at a cer­tain percentage?

That’s Laura Daw­son in the The Juicy Details, one of sev­eral blog posts she man­aged to knit into the unrav­el­ing scarf of pub­lish­ing Wednesday.

Daw­son answered her own ques­tion at what my Google Reader says was 4:49 p.m.: Two other indus­tries know agency pric­ing — Apple prod­ucts are with­held from retail­ers who dis­count them, she writes, and the price of milk in New York and New Jer­sey is con­trolled by a dairy board.

From the Morris/inkle Franken­stein app | Pro­file Books

I’m par­tic­u­larly glad to have inkle stu­dios’ advance art­work for the Ether from Dave Mor­ris’ forth­com­ing Franken­stein app from Pro­file Books. Mary Shel­ley is said to have come up with her idea from a bad dream about a sci­en­tist who didn’t like the results of his experiment.

And now here we are, wak­ing up with three of the “Big Five” pub­lish­ers in the Depart­ment of Jus­tice inves­ti­ga­tion — Harper­Collins, Simon & Schus­ter, and Hachette — hus­tling right over to set­tle the antitrust law­suit out of court. They admit to no wrong­do­ing, mind you (which is hardly unusual in set­tle­ments). Macmil­lan and Pen­guin have not set­tled, nor has Apple.

For the basics, I’ll do is point you toward a cou­ple of strong sum­ma­tions of the action, rather than crawl­ing back through the nit­tier grit here.

• Laura Haz­ard Owen at paid­Con­tent has posted Every­thing you need to know about today’s e-book law­suit in one post.
• And Julie Bosman put together, and has updated, Jus­tice Dept. Sues Apple and Pub­lish­ers Over E-Book Pric­ing; 3 Pub­lish­ers Set­tle at the Times.

More inter­est­ing, from the Eth­er­nau­ti­cal per­spec­tive, is the arc of the noise Wednes­day as the core pub­lish­ing com­mu­nity jock­eyed on Twit­ter and in too many me-too blog posts to count. The chal­lenge was to gain the snark advan­tage for a few sec­onds, maybe with a crack about pub­lish­ing CEOs meet­ing at a restau­rant the name of which the DoJ mis­spelled. Or how much it looked as if Ama­zon had writ­ten the alle­ga­tions. #hahaha

A lot of this palaver was unnec­es­sar­ily loose, some­times irre­spon­si­ble, prob­a­bly none too impres­sive to any­one fol­low­ing from out­side the industry.

There were fist-pump mes­sages mov­ing around in response to A Mes­sage from John Sar­gent, the Macmil­lan chief announc­ing, “We have decided to fight this in court.” Sar­gent asserted that he decided “to move MacMil­lan to the agency model…on Jan­u­ary 22nd, 2010, a lit­tle after 4:00 AM on an exer­cise bike in my basement.”

@Don­Linn I think it would be a nice and thrilling ges­ture if Ama­zon sent the Big Six free gravestones.

Mon­day 9 April 12 06:38 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mikecane

Mike Cane

On read­ing the state­ment from Sar­gent, one angry observer tweeted that just because some pub­lish­ers were set­tling, they weren’t nec­es­sar­ily guilty of the DoJ’s charges of collusion.

And that’s true.

But of course no one tweeted the con­verse: just because Macmil­lan and/or Pen­guin and/or Apple go to court fight the DoJ’s lawsuit?–doesn’t mean that one or all of them is inno­cent of the alle­ga­tions, either.

Unless you’re one of the chiefs of a com­pany named in the suit, you don’t actu­ally know.

I just want to know which one of you harshly turned down some DoJ official’s cat book and made them want to screw around with our industry?

Wednes­day 11 April 12 16:44 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Gin­ger Clark

The Amazon-bashing was typ­i­cally high. Actual read­ings of the DoJ’s brief — widely avail­able online — seemed unfor­tu­nately low.

And when Jeff John Roberts at paid­Con­tent wrote that 16 states had filed their own antitrust law­suits — States pile on, claim Apple e-book con­spir­acy cost con­sumers $100 mil­lion — some took it as a sig­nal to bemoan a “black day for pub­lish­ing,” the indus­try cast as a vic­tim. They might be for­given based on Roberts’ head­line, toned as it was with that phrase “states pile on” — some­thing short of neu­tral, isn’t it?

To be clear, I’m a con­sis­tent sup­porter of paidContent’s folks’ work. Since some of them at times report and at other times com­ment, I’d like them to make it clearer when they’re in which mode. Com­men­tary is great, espe­cially from peo­ple as astute as Roberts and his asso­ciates — just slug it as such, and do it faithfully.

Authors and read­ers should collude.

Wednes­day 11 April 12 12:43 via Twit­ter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@ChrisKubica

Chris Kubica

Wednes­day lunch at the foot of the gal­lows found some of our col­leagues in New York one-upping each other with jokes about how they’d best not gather in groups at restau­rants for fear of being charged by the DoJ with col­lu­sion. #haha

Wiser wonks got qui­eter, hang­ing back at noon to test the grav­ity of Attor­ney Gen­eral Eric Holder’s news con­fer­ence state­ment on CNBC and other news net­works’ live coverage:

We believe that con­sumers paid mil­lions of dol­lars more for some of the most pop­u­lar titles.

Hold onto that lan­guage about con­sumers. We’ll be back to it shortly.

An inter­est­ing out­come would be if Apple set­tled with DOJ

Wednes­day 11 April 12 11:13 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

The phras­ing of the court fil­ing was catch­ing up with the morning’s gid­di­ness. Here are a few quick excerpts from United States of Amer­ica vs. Apple, Inc.; Hachette Book Group, Inc.; Harper­Collins Pub­lish­ers, LLC; Ver­lags­gruppe Georg von Hotlzbrinck Pub­lish­ers, LLC, dba Macmil­lan; the Pen­guin Group, a divi­sion of Pear­son, PLC, Pen­guin Group (USA), Inc.; and Simon & Schus­ter, Inc.:

The Pub­lisher Defen­dants reg­u­larly com­mu­ni­cated with each other in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, both in per­son and on the tele­phone, and in emails to each other to exchange sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion and assur­ances of sol­i­dar­ity to advance the ends of the conspiracy…directly dis­cussed, agreed to, and encour­aged each other to col­lec­tive action to force Ama­zon to raise its retail ebook prices…took steps to con­ceal their com­mu­ni­ca­tions with one another, includ­ing instruc­tions to “dou­ble delete” email and tak­ing other mea­sures to avoid leav­ing a paper trail…

The attor­ney gen­eral thanked those piled-on states’ attor­neys gen­eral and “our part­ners at the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion for their hard work and close coop­er­a­tion.” Oh yeah. The EC is across this, too.

thoughts on the agency law­suit. 1: i do not believe there was col­lu­sion by the major publishers.

Wednes­day 11 April 12 10:49 via Twit­ter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@booksquare

Kas­sia Krozser

2: clearly there was some­thing in the dis­cov­ery process (so to speak) that lead the jus­tice depart­ment to think otherwise.

Wednes­day 11 April 12 10:50 via Twit­ter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@booksquare

Kas­sia Krozser

3: when we say agency has increased com­pe­ti­tion, what we really mean is it’s cre­ated a few mega­s­tores. we’ve lost more than we’ve gained.

Wednes­day 11 April 12 10:51 via Twit­ter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@booksquare

Kas­sia Krozser

By mid-afternoon, what had just hours ear­lier looked like a conga line of defi­ance had kinked up…tighter smiles, weaker laughs. #ha

We were ready for Mathew Ingram, whose tim­ing often seems as canny as his analy­sis. Writ­ing at GigaOM, he got in one of the most clar­i­fy­ing pas­sages of the day. Here’s Ingram in The e-book wars: Who is less evil, Ama­zon or book pub­lish­ers? and the empha­sis is mine:

The pur­pose of antitrust law isn’t nec­es­sar­ily to pro­tect smaller com­pa­nies from larger com­pa­nies, or even to pre­vent monop­o­lies per se — the pur­pose is to pro­tect con­sumers from the impact of a monop­oly or col­lu­sive behavior.

Ingram goes on to answer some who have asserted with much more gusto than guile that it’s Ama­zon the Jus­tice Depart­ment should sue:

A case against Ama­zon wouldn’t make any sense unless it could be shown that Amazon’s behav­ior was caus­ing higher prices — but the real­ity is that the pub­lish­ers are the ones whose behav­ior is lead­ing to higher prices (the pub­lish­ers who set­tled get two years of “mod­i­fied” agency pricing).

No, your honor, there was no col­lu­sion. It’s just a case of pub­lish­ers being lem­mings. One does some­thing, we all have to do it #pub­de­fenses

Wednes­day 11 April 12 14:17 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bsandusky

Brett San­dusky

And by evening, East­ern time, a late-night post­ing in Lon­don came rustling across to us on Sam Missingham’s TheFutureBook’s blogs from journo Philip Jones. He’d kept tabs on the incre­men­tal progress of the news all day. In Fallen agents — how every­thing just changed, Jones not only comes to the desk with plenty of wit and expe­ri­ence, but he also has the bless­ing of that ocean’s dis­tance from our pageant.

Pen­guin and Macmil­lan, decid­ing to stand and fight, seem full of fine bravado, writes Jones, but:

Both com­pa­nies are tak­ing an enor­mous risk in see­ing the DoJ in court. The evi­dence against them looks sub­stan­tial, notwith­stand­ing Makinson’s view that the DoJ fil­ing “con­tains a num­ber of mate­r­ial mis­state­ments and omis­sions.” The costs will be huge, the impli­ca­tions if they lose enor­mous, and the poten­tial for fur­ther rep­u­ta­tional dam­age, even if they do pull off a win, clear.

Macmil­lan CEO John Sargent’s let­ter re: DOJ suit sums things up per­fectly: http://t.co/9K45lfG5 Sar­gent is my new hero. #TOC­con

Wednes­day 11 April 12 12:50 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jwikert

Joe Wik­ert

Then Jones gets at some­thing poten­tially even darker. Dur­ing the after­noon, he and I dis­cussed it briefly on Twit­ter as “the stain” — too many gor­geous ex-Shelley illus­tra­tions. But the nut of what we were say­ing is here, bet­ter parsed by Jones, again with my emphasis:

The big­ger worry is that pub­lish­ers have not just lost this bat­tle, they will also now lose the peace. Even if col­lu­sion did not take place, the sug­ges­tion of it is now indeli­ble.

Any black­ness to the 11th of April for pub­lish­ers, you see, likely was — with what­ever intent — assem­bled in the labs of those pub­lish­ers’ own com­mer­cial exper­i­men­ta­tion. Our pub­lish­ers and their entourages are danc­ing with the crea­tures they made. Jones:

Pub­lish­ers now need to focus on the next step: adjust­ing to a world where ebooks become the dom­i­nant format…where they have lit­tle con­trol over whether their audi­ence chooses to read in e or p, and where they can­not cre­ate bar­ri­ers to ebook adop­tion by using price.

An inter­est­ing line in Dave Mor­ris’ Shelley-ing: “Yes, the creature’s skele­tal frame has con­tin­ued to grow inside the tank. I didn’t expect it to become so misshapen.”

Who did? “All men mean well,” Shaw told us in “The Revolutionist’s Hand­book” that fol­lows Man and Super­man. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Jones:

I’m strug­gling to see any win­ners here, except of course Ama­zon, which has already said that it looks for­ward to extend­ing dis­counts across more ebooks. Oh, and book read­ers who will enjoy cheap ebooks from a dwin­dling range of pub­lish­ers and retailers.

One side wants to lower book prices. The other is fight­ing to keep them high. Can you guess which is the monop­oly? #NotA­Trick­Ques­tion

Wednes­day 11 April 12 21:23 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@barryeisler

Barry Eisler

The app: For mod­ern Prometheans

The key image for the Morris/inkle Franken­stein is a work of Vesal­ius from “De cor­poris humani fab­rica libri septem.”

Franken­stein — from which our Ether-eal art­work is drawn this week — is a new adap­ta­tion of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic.

It’s writ­ten by Lon­don author Dave Mor­ris and devel­oped by him with the assis­tance of Jon Ingold, a for­mer Sony Playsta­tion designer, and his peo­ple at Cambridge’s inkle, a trans­me­dia sto­ry­telling studio.

Mor­ris grad­u­ated from the other place, Oxford. He read physics, which he has brought to bear on his 2011 graphic novel with Leo Har­tas, Mirabilis: Year of Won­ders, and, now, on lever­ag­ing the dark­est cor­ners of Shelley’s imag­in­ings — “how igno­rant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!”

Here, Mor­ris tells me, Vic­tor Franken­stein still is from Geneva, but rather than being at Bavaria’s Ingol­stadt (where the Illu­mi­nati were estab­lished, inci­den­tally), he’s at uni­ver­sity in Paris. In 1792. Which would seem to be an incon­ve­nient place and time for a DIY project about cob­bling together a guy on a slab. But what do I know? — no short­age of anatom­i­cal raw mate­r­ial, one assumes.

From the Morris/inkle Franken­stein app | Pro­file Books

Dash­ing ahead of the usual gam­i­fi­ca­tion grum­bling, Mor­ris says in his pre-launch statement:

Franken­stein isn’t a game. It’s not about win­ning or los­ing or solv­ing puz­zles. It’s a lit­er­ary expe­ri­ence where the reader can explore the text, cre­at­ing a unique and per­sonal expe­ri­ence of this rightly world-famous work. As the plot unfolds, you develop a per­sonal rela­tion­ship with the main char­ac­ters. That’s why we’re describ­ing it as inter­ac­tive lit­er­a­ture — it’s a truly new kind of novel for the dig­i­tal age.

Touted by Pro­file Books as “the first lit­er­ary, inter­ac­tive book app,” this Franken­stein goes on sale in two weeks, on April 26, for £2.99 (US$4.76) — only for iPads and iPhones.

Your Android/Kindle money appar­ently has no allure for Pro­file Books, noth­ing seems planned for the hud­dled mil­lions of us on tablets and phones beyond Apple’s reach.

Spe­cial thanks to Profile’s PR folks for get­ting these images to me.

And here’s a trailer, if you’d like to get the tone of the app, with some Beethoven (from the Fifth, the open­ing of the Alle­gro) hand­somely efforted by the Fulda Sym­phonic Orches­tra, Simon Schindler con­duct­ing. I’m able to iden­tify the artists for you because the music is gra­ciously cred­ited on the video’s page, bravo.

I feel like an orange. I never thought I’d say that.

Mon­day 9 April 12 18:11 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MirabilisDave

Dave Mor­ris

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

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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