(Thanks to Levi Asher for production help.)
Month / May 2010
BEA 2010: The CEO Panel (“The Value of a Book”)
Moderator: Jonathan Galassi (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Participants: Bob Miller (Workman), Esther Newberg (ICM), Skip Prichard (Ingram), David Shanks (Penguin), Oren Telcher (ABA), Scott Turow (Authors Guild)
It didn’t take long for Tuesday morning’s CEO panel to dredge up the same tired tropes about eBooks, which is just as nauseating whether you hear it from the tech-oriented libertarians or the old codgers who continue to pretend that the Kindle never came out. Moderator Jonathan Galassi, failing to provide a sufficient balance between these two extremes, opted to pretend that eBooks didn’t exist. “The title was supposed to be ‘The Value of a Book,” said Galassi, referring to the print variety twenty minutes into the panel, and hoping to steer the conversation into variables more applicable to the Carter Administration. Alas, with the exception of Scott Turow (nearly as as ill-informed as Galassi), the other panelists very much wanted to discuss reality.
It didn’t make much sense for the panel to escape these hard questions. After all, as ABA President Michael Tucker announced during the panel’s introduction, speaking in a lifeless and sleep-inducing tone, “In a fast-changing digital world, there is extraordinary value in an event like BookExpo.” I’m not sure if Tucker believed it. Certainly I didn’t. I had worn my Night of the Living Dead T-shirt to Javits for a reason. But if I were an FSG author, I would be very concerned indeed about Galassi’s present understanding of the industry.
Galassi, growing visibly flustered as the other panelists politely informed him about present market conditions (with limited comprehension on Galassi’s end), not only maintained the old warhorse position that hardcovers would still be desired by 100% of book purchasers, but clung to such feeble driftwood as “We’re always going to need warehouses” and, on the position of enhanced books, “Who has time for the enhancement?” He also claimed that no author is going to want to publish his work online for free. Obviously, Galassi hasn’t heard of the Huffington Post.
More preposterous than these pronouncements was the chestnut Galassi lodged midway through the panel. Shortly after Galassi declared, “I feel that there’s something radically wrong about the way a market has been determined.” Well, that’s fine. But it’s the customers who determine the market, not Galassi. Galassi then seriously suggested that Scott Turow had the right to a career. “People should be willing to pay $4 million,” Galassi said of Turow, shortly after offering a declaration that Turow had paid his dues.
Turow may very well have paid his dues. But if the customers don’t want to buy his books, then perhaps he shouldn’t be entitled to the staggering advances that most authors can only dream about. Ingram’s Skip Prichard then politely explained to Galassi the realities of the free market: “We’re in a competitive market. Scott’s not in a vacuum. You have to look at the options.” And after this high school economics supply and demand lesson, Galassi stayed quiet for a good share of the panel. This allowed Prichard to point to how libraries had reinvented themselves over the past ten years, digitizing their archives and adding coffee bars and seats. Bookstores, indicated Prichard, were also going to change.
Brian O’Leary and Authors Guild members will be interested to learn that Turow claimed that piracy was the biggest risk to the books industry. Never mind that present indicators suggest that piracy isn’t particularly ubiquitous and that the stakes remain relatively small.
At least Penguin’s David Shanks understood that the eBooks market remained quite small, understanding that less than 10% of the total books market could hardly be called a mass market. After all, purchasing a reading device was a sizable investment for the average Joe. “The mass audience is not right now buying those reading devices,” said Shanks. The time would come later for serious adoption “as the publishers start to get better information,” said Shanks, “and realize the efficiencies of not printing.”
Prichard also pointed out that tomorrow’s readers “will not want to have their next book on a single device.” While he didn’t offer any immediate remedies on how to make this happen, he was forward-thinking enough to observe that tomorrow’s books are “not going to be about the device.”
At one point, Turow asked, “Why did publishers ever agree for the eBook to be available at the same time as the hardcover?” To which one can sufficiently reply, why hasn’t Scott Turow ever paid attention to what the customers want? If he hasn’t tracked the omnipresent fury over this issue, then is he really qualified to serve as Authors Guild President?
The ABA’s Brad Telcher thankfully made a case for the inclusive middle ground. Observing that physical and digital space need not be separated into a binary value, he stated that booksellers needed to be focused on the content and that the books industry needed to meet any and all customer needs. “We should be format neutral,” said Telcher.
Bob Miller, having recently departed from the imprint HarperStudio for Workman, was perhaps the most austere eBook evangelist on the panel. He noted quite rightly that customers wouldn’t want to wait for the eBook edition, but seemed to exude an off-putting Dunning-Kruger vibe when he boasted of attending eBook conferences from ten years before. “I was at those conferences,” he said. “We were really excited.”
I much preferred the quieter and more easygoing Telcher (along with the zinger-spouting Esther Newberg), the panel’s best advocate for unity. “What we do,” said Telcher, “is put the right book in the hand of the appropriate customer. We believe that there are a significant number of consumers who want to come to a place.” He pointed to the importance of preserving the showrooms, noting that declining record stores had taken away much of the community within the music business. Telcher wasn’t naive enough to dismiss the idea of selling eBooks within physical spaces.
Indeed, Turow proved both uninformed and somewhat condescending towards those who enjoy eBooks — presumably because it cuts into his million dollar advances. “A lot of those people are buying more books,” said Turow, “and they enjoy playing with their toy.” He insisted that most users of “reading machines” were part of “the flying class.”
As these men began huffing about various format limitations, the heel-wagging Newberg, who served almost as a second-string moderator after Galassi’s eyes seemed to glaze over permanently, asked how a physical book can compete when book tours have been cut back and when newspapers have cut back. She pointed to online word of mouth, and also noted that physical books needed to be beautiful in order to matter. She pointed to a forthcoming Steve Martin book constructed of vellum paper.
Prichard would have none of this. “There’s going to be a niche that cares about that.” He pointed to the enormous pressure from the digital market, but concluded that “the vast majority of readers don’t care.”
“We are a niche,” replied Newberg. “We’re not a giant business.”
Miller, to his credit, did observe that a book’s look and feel was important. But I looked to Prichard and wondered if he was going to blow a gasket.
“You’re making it sound like choices,” interceded Telcher. “Consumers are different too.”
My notes indicate that Prichard used the word “choices” five times in less than a minute. I thought immediately of Rod Steiger’s over-the-top general in Mars Attacks and I wasn’t alone. I noticed that the gentleman sitting to my left, the veins in his neck popping out with apparent outrage, was talking back to the panel. “You’re not a creator!” he seethed in response to Prichard. I wondered if he needed a hug. Perhaps more than Galassi.
At this point, the panel then more or less rehashed the same arguments and my notes became less frequent. Perhaps the panel’s truest sentiment came from Newberg, who remarked that one of the nice things about getting old was not having to worry about the resolution of all these arguments. I can’t say that I blame her. If many of these executives won’t pay attention to contemporary realities, then we may have to wait for some of these pigheaded types to die off before a cooperative fusion between authors, publishers, agents, and customers will keep this industry alive. Maybe then we’ll get some of that “extraordinary value” that Tucker was sleep-talking about.
Conned by Lost
On Sunday night, Lost concluded its six-year run with a nausea-inducing smorgasbord of meet-cutes and hackneyed dialogue, securing its place on the mantle occupied by The Sopranos and the Battlestar Galactica remake. Here was a once great program — a formerly fine creative offering that had once juggled philosophy, intricate human relationships, and quantum theory — reducing itself to poorly contrived romance. You almost expected a dying Barbara Hershey to show up, with Bette Midler singing to a packed Hollywood Bowl crowd. But the bar was perched much lower with Drive Shaft playing the Widmore concert. In one of many preposterous lines delivered over the course of the night, a man told a woman giving birth, “I’m with the band.” Which surely counts as one of the most preposterous explanations related to pregnancy in television history.
Granted, the sixth season’s sideways universe, reliant as it was upon improbable coincidences and even less convincing human behavior, represented a vile wish fulfillment. But wouldn’t it have been more interesting to be conned more respectfully? It was difficult for any reasonable person to believe that Hugo would conveniently show up after Locke had been fired and offered a job. We saw last week that Desmond, Kate, and Sayid were criminals on the lam, but, this week, they magically eluded any and all APBs. And in an even worse surrender, the knowledge of their lives on the island was translated by touch. The finale’s closing moment, more interminable than a soporific Oscars ceremony and containing the discomfiting whiff of some Fred Phelps-like figure steering the story, suggested less gracefully than Ambrose Bierce (or even Jacob’s Ladder writer Bruce Joel Rubin) that the last six years had more or less been inside Jack’s Judeo-Christian head. (No accident that dear papa was named Christian.) And we were blessed with the producers insulting the audience’s intelligence with that dreadful church congregation. With its sixth season, Lost had capitulated its artistic credibility for the doldrums of dumbed down entertainment. What if the program had ended with the nuclear bomb and the sacrifices at the end of the fifth season? Would this not have created more enigmas for the febrile Losties to argue about at conventions over the next few decades? Would this not have been greater art? The mysteries resolved in the last year were done so with such distressing literalism that one sensed the telltale smell of otiose ABC executives pressuring writers into a more pedestrian direction.
But beyond any speculations (and there will no doubt be many), it was clear this year that the writers didn’t have a plan and they didn’t know when to quit. They concluded the show with a half-hearted amalgam of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and Charles Beaumont’s short story, “The Howling Man.” The characters had moved on. Evil had to be stopped from leaving the island. The Man in Black fled across the isle, and the surgeon followed.
The two people to blame for Sunday’s catastrophe are writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who were also responsible for the gratuitous spoon-feeder “Across the Sea” from two weeks earlier. Indeed, you can trace the abysmal dip in Lost‘s writing quality to Brian K. Vaughan’s exit just before the final season. He was hired as an executive story editor during the third season hiatus, when the series was in tremendous trouble with too many forced imprisonments and not enough momentum. And a program that looked as if it was a lost cause suddenly became interesting again. Then Vaughan left. We may never know the real reasons why. But PR spin will shine its rosy light in the years to come.
As a result, Lost, which had become so wonderfully convoluted during the fifth season with two head-spinning and steadily shifting timelines, became a viewing experience in which you could fold laundry and still follow the plot. It took a great celestial concept and turned it into The Celestine Prophecy. It rejected the built-in audience that had theorized so fervently over the years and pissed into its face. And that’s too bad. Because for a long time, Lost was above such debasement.
The Bat Segundo Show: Daniel Okrent
Daniel Okrent appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #337. Mr. Okrent is most recently the author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
Listen: Play in new window | Download
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Bombarded by too much bathtub gin and too many over-the-top movie trailers.
Author: Daniel Okrent
Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about Walgreen’s. You point out that it went from twenty locations in 1920 to 525 during the 1920s, pointing out that it wasn’t just milkshakes that were responsible for this expansion. Yet all you present in the book to support this possibility is an interview with Charles Walgreen, Jr., who said in an interview with John Bacon that his father didn’t want the fire department in his stores because he was losing cases of liquor. I’m wondering if you made any efforts to corroborate this claim from another source. Has Walgreen’s managed to hush this up?
Okrent: Well, I think — be careful. I don’t make a claim. I say —
Correspondent: Suggestion.
Okrent: I make a suggestion. And that’s all I can do — is make a suggestion. But we do know this to be true. We know from Charles Walgreen, Sr.’s testimony to his son that they had liquor in the stores and he was afraid of losing it to the thieves. Right? Number two. We know that he had twenty stores at the beginning of Prohibition and 525 at the end. And if you want to believe it’s milkshakes, believe that it’s milkshakes. But the fact — the medicinal liquor business was an enormous business. Not just for the Walgreen’s drugstores, but for pharmacists across the country. You know, I have a bottle at home on my shelf. It’s kind of an inspiration. It’s an empty bottle. It says JIM BEAN. BOTTLED AND BOND. FOR MEDICINAL PURPOSES ONLY. This was a pure racket. And druggists, unless they had some kind of scruple that few apparently had, made a fortune because of it.
Correspondent: But beyond the Bacon interview, did you make any efforts to….?
Okrent: Yeah. I made efforts. There’s nobody alive in the Walgreen family today that I tried to make contact with, that had any thoughts about it either way. Or not. I don’t think that there’s been a conscious effort to cover it up. I think that it’s just forgotten.
Correspondent: Al Capone cultivated an image of benevolence. And you also point to Seattle bootlegger Roy Olmstead, who was quite ethical by comparison. He didn’t dilute his liquor. He didn’t resort to mob tactics. I’m wondering what factors made Olmstead a more ethical bootlegger. Was it Olmstead the man? Or was it the makeup of Seattle in comparison to the competitive violent world of Chicago?
Okrent: Yeah, I think that the latter has a lot to do with it. By all evidence, Olmstead was a decent man. You know, he was the youngest police lieutenant in the history of the Seattle Department. He was looked on as a golden boy of sorts. But because of his honesty, because he didn’t dilute, because he didn’t raise prices, he had very happy customers in Seattle. And he also worked very well with anybody else who was in the business. He built a big coalition. Really kind of a market control coalition. He controlled all of the booze that was coming into the Pacific Northwest. Capone was in a very different circumstance. I think that he was a different kind of man to begin with. And secondarily, he was in an extremely competitive cutthroat murderous environment, in which other people were trying to get a piece of the action. Olmstead didn’t try to accrue power to himself. He liked to run a good business. Capone wanted to be in charge.
The thing to me about Capone that is most surprising, relative to the popular image that we have of Capone, is that when he took over Chicago, he was twenty-five years old. He was a kid. And he was gone before he was thirty.
Correspondent: And he was played by all these older actors too.
Okrent: Yeah. I ask people, “How old do you think Al Capone was when he ran Chicago?” They say, forty-eight, thirty-seven, fifty. But he was a baby.
Correspondent: But in Seattle, was there violence involved?
Okrent: There wasn’t much violence in Seattle. There was a nicely cooperative operation between those who enforced the law and those who were breaking the law. Including the fact that the justice of the peace who presided over hearings and trials, they got a piece of the fine. So they liked the idea of people being arrested, paying a fine, and then went about it again — so that they could be arrested again. So they could pay the fine again.
Correspondent: So Olmstead set the precedent of a peaceful, money-oriented coalition here.
Okrent: Yeah. I think that there were others like that were others like that also in the country. But Seattle was remarkably free of the violent crime that hit the Eastern and Midwestern cities.
Correspondent: What other cities were nonviolent in terms of bootlegging?
Okrent: Nonviolent. San Francisco. I think that San Francisco and, to some degree, New Orleans are the ones that come immediately to mind. San Francisco never really acknowledged that Prohibition existed. Even the judges in San Francisco. They threw cases out. The DA of San Francisco, which is both a city and a county — he was an official in the organization against the Prohibition Amendment. He campaigned against it. So violence wasn’t necessary. Because there was nobody trying to corner a market. It was an open market for everybody.
The Bat Segundo Show #337: Daniel Okrent (Download MP3)
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The Bat Segundo Show: Joseph Wallace
Joseph Wallace appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #336. Mr. Wallace is most recently the author of Diamond Ruby.
Listen: Play in new window | Download
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Replacing his failed Atkins diet with three square squirrel meals each day.
Author: Joseph Wallace
Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: Radar guns were introduced in 1935 to measure a baseball’s speed. Before that, you had speed machines, which were increasingly rare. And as I understand it, there’s extremely little recorded information on pre-radar speed machines. In this book, Ruby looks at the machine in question, and you write, “To be honest, she couldn’t make head or tail of it.” This leads me to believe that there was some guesswork or confabulation upon your part.
Wallace: No. The only thing I didn’t know was exactly what — that’s a great question. In 1913, Baseball Magazine decided that they wanted to figure out how fast Walter Johnson and — I can’t remember, Matt. I can’t remember. Another pitcher. Walter Johnson pitched. But of course, that wasn’t so easy to do in 1913. So they went — in fact, as the book says, they went to the Remington Arms Company. And they said, “Help us out. We want to be able to do this.” The Remington Arms Company, in fact, has a device for measuring the speeds that bullets flew that was exactly the way I describe the speed machine here. Baseball Magazine — in fact, this is all completely accurate; it was one of those things that I found for a nonfiction book and loved and said, “Oh, I have to be able to use this somehow” — they ended up doing a fifteen page article that described and photographed the wire mesh that you had to throw the ball through. It was the simplest thing. You’d throw a baseball. It would brush through the mesh, which would register on the device. It would then hit a steel plate that was also wired to the device. They had the ability then to calculate the amount of time in between. And they knew the distance. And they could figure out how fast the ball was going. So they did this article. It was really, really hard for Walter Johnson, who was incredibly fast and incredibly accurate, to throw the ball through the wire mesh. So the only thing I changed from the original was that I made the mesh — the screen that Ruby and the people who are throwing the ball against her — bigger. Because if Walter Johnson had trouble getting it through, it would be really unfair to anybody other than Ruby.
It was a wonderful article. And my favorite thing about it was that, when I was researching the book, I went to the Remington Company and I said, “Tell me more.” And the Remington Company said, “We had never heard of this. We believe it exists. Here’s a historical forum where people talk about Remington’s history. Go to it.” And I went to it. And I posted. And I asked a bunch of questions about it. And people were so fascinated. And they’d seen the article. But none of them still exist. In other words, it’s a lost part of the Remington Arms Company’s history that they used to measure the speed of bullets.
Correspondent: They don’t keep very good records.
Wallace: They must not. I was very disappointed! So the answer is that it’s completely accurate. The only thing that wasn’t accurate, other than the size of the mesh, was the fact that the photographs of the machine itself don’t take you into the inner workings. So everything is accurate. Except I couldn’t describe how it worked inside. Because that wasn’t there. But I probably would not have been able to write the entire Coney Island part. This book — if there’s one article that’s the most important thing to this entire book, it’s the fact that in 1913, Baseball Magazine was smart enough. And, in fact, the same year, they decided to look into whether lengths of arms actually increased how fast you were. And there was a long article with all these shots — again, Walter Johnson, who had very long arms — standing there shirtless as they measured his wingspan versus other pitchers’ wingspans. So Baseball Magazine was this remarkably forward-thinking and clever magazine back in the 1910s.
Correspondent: Very conceptual, it sounds like.
Wallace: And extremely helpful to a writer like me! Who needed both long arms and the speed machine to make the book work.
(Image: Mary Reagan)
The Bat Segundo Show #336: Joseph Wallace (Download MP3)
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