Borders Death Rattle? Or: Borders on the Rocks; Not a Drink You Want to Order. I went to one of our major surviving Borders mega book stores today (Sunday 29 May 2011) and was shocked at how it has deteriorated in just one week since my last visit. Clerks still desperately pump every customer to 'upgrade' by paying $20 they may never recoup. Newsletter recipients get barraged by a constant series of 40% or 50% coupons and more Borders Bucks than ever. In some sense, the strategy is working. Sometimes you see long lines of people holding books they are about to buy at morbid discounts designed to lose money but bring warm, breathing bodies into the denatured retail space. With publishers cutting off credit, the traditional consignment model appears to be no longer in effect. Borders apparently must pay cash for any books received, upon delivery. In the consignment model, the Big Six merrily sent boxes of new books every month, no questions asked, expecting that checks for books sold will arrive within normal credit terms (30 days), and piles of remaindered books would have their torn-off covers returned to New York City for accounting purposes. I was shocked at the tawdry, closeout atmosphere today, far worse than a week ago. Many shelves were bare. Many shelves were jumbled together haphazardly, as in a cut-rate, last ditch store front. Many of the gaping merchandising holes were patched by inserting shelves of closeout hardcovers marked down to the bare bones. Most of the experienced clerks seem to be gone, replaced by fresh faces who no doubt labor at minimum wage with minimal or no benefits. In the bathroom, the soap dish is no longer filled, but a bottle of cheap supermarket hand soap beckons five-finger discounters. It seems to me that the handwriting is on the wall. The demise is imminent, most likely before we get too deeply into summer. I never cared for Borders' management and Borders' policies, but the people were nice, and the books were on a par with print product everywhere. I bought an overpriced paperback copy of Lawrence Durrell's Justine today, from his Alexandria Quartet. It may be the last print book I buy before switching totally to digital; and maybe the last book I'll buy at Borders before she slips under the waves… (Bloomberg-Businessweek 23 May 2011)

Wattpad: YouTube for E-Books I'd call it more an American Idol for Self-Publishers. It looks like yet another interesting, grass-roots initiative in the developing New Publishing. It appears to be mostly by and about teenagers, which should be fabulous news for the future of reading, and therefore of literature. Maybe we can even call it part of a Digital Spring, as the Berlin Wall of the old print publishing falls down in a heap of dust… (Publishers Weekly 20 May 2011)

Digital Pricing Stirs Outrage and Innovation Mainly this is about how New York City's collapsing Big Six print publishers are having a hard time reconciling their futures (if any) with the realities of a new world rushing toward them like a hundred freight trains… (PC World 26 May 2011).

Book Expo America 2011: Digital Wild West At the annual print schmooze in, where else, New York City, "Authors are shrugging off publishers to self-publish their work. Publishers are advancing into retail. Barnes & Noble is getting deeper into the gadget business, and Amazon is stepping into publishing." The Big Six may soon be the Big Seven for a short time, as Amazon gets in and Big Print flushes down the drain… (NY Times 26 May 2011).

Print Not Dead, Say Big Six At Book Expo America 2011, or as one might call it, 'The Print Bunker,' the Old Publishing barons call up imaginary armies and pore over fantasy maps to calculate ghostly strategies, under cover of 25,000 blazing guns and rocket launchers aimed at them, even as Digital tanks and troops start to storm the suburbs of Print City… (Publishers Weekly 26 May 2011).

International Digital Publishing Forum In conjunction with Book Expo America 2011, IDPF heard remarkable predictions about the advance of digital publishing… (Publishers Weekly 24 May 2011). NOTE: Among the rumblings was pessimism for 'enhanced e-books.' As usual, the Big Six, on their journey have reached a creek we pioneers forded fifteen years ago. At the time, digitizing the first proprietary web-published novels in the world, we saw the spectrum of distance between video and text. Both are digital. People had already been publishing CDs (remember those?) with mixed media on them, and it seemed like a natural evolution to enhance text with images and sound. But wait a moment—the ahah! has yet to find its moment in the ink-sludged minds of New York's printerati—that's called a cartoon or a video or a slide show or whatever, right? We may be innovating the method by which stories are delivered (horse versus truck, digital versus paper) but we are not altering the nature of story itself, at least not in this revolution or this iteration. I'm just now reading Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, a great novel that was butchered into a film romance of great sentimental appeal and box office coin clattering, but the film did nothing to diminish the power of Pasternak's narrative. Text is king, all by itself, without visual or auditory adornments. One can only detract from the mind's power (the most complex and sophisticated logic engine in the universe) by trying to blur in other sensory paradigms. This is, in fact, a fundamental lesson about writing. 'Show, don't tell' must be further reduced in granularity to 'Evoke, don't describe.' Simply put, this means the writer as orchestrator of the novel as computer program cannot create a perfect scene in the reader's mind; the writer's great skill lies in successfully evoking what is already in the reader's mind, by saying just enough of just the right thing, and no more. That is a writing lesson for another day. Here, we have a lesson in publishing: stick with text. Leave the cartoons and videos to other people, who specialize in those things. Enhanced text is a dead end. As an added footnote, it's curious that this article leads with Kobo, a reading device tied up and bogged down with the faltering Borders and its long outdated internal book database, just as B&N releases their newest dedicated reader.

Publishers Still Needed, so Vote Publishers At Book Expo America 2011, they called it The Big Debate. Are publishers still needed, when any author can self-publish his or her book? It seems like a comical situation, like watching a hundred or whatever horse breeders around 1900 debating whether trucks will ever replace horses for carrying beer to taverns. Of course they were all going to vote for horses, if that meeting ever took place. The confusion lies in form versus function. The form of the Big Six, having been amply outlined in these pages, is a generic corporate cartel; a Soviet-style monopoly (a contradiction until you analyze the reality) hampering free enterprise, competition, and literary quality. This is not just a fault of the Big Six, but ingrained in human nature and social power structures that reward ownership (even if not legitimate), repression, and uniformity, while punishing or forbidding originality, freedom, and creativity. The function of publishing, once all the cartel stuff is stripped away, is to provide a service—and this I continue to learn in real-time as small-press publisher of Clocktower Books (world's six digital publisher, since 1996). This does not mean stealing all of an author's rights just to crank out a paperback and then let it go out of print but refuse to revert the author's rights, and similar crimes. It means providing technical services, whether print or digital, that most authors do not have the background to render for themselves. That includes everything from editorial services to layout and text flow, to effective cover art and blurbs, to channeling the work into the optimal retail channels. For that, publishers will always be needed. With honesty, integrity, hard work, and skill, the publisher can usually render a service worth something to the writer. In the typical digital split of 50/50—not counting what the Big Six are attempting in their little world—both the publisher and the author stand to profit from a successful book. Remember, that's after the retailer (e.g., Amazon.com, Powells.com, BN.com) take their piece. At the end of the day, there is no worth in the Big Six cartel. There is, however, plenty of value to offer as a legitimate publisher… (Publishers Weekly 23 May 2011).

Can Publishers Sell Direct to Consumers? Interesting questions are raised about publishers (presumably in the old Big Six mode) doing away with middlemen and selling direct. Do publishers care about their consumer? Thought provoking, touches some surprising nerves. For example, how do publishers market their backlist (the generally stolen rights they keep in a death locker, and refuse to release back to the author when the majority of these things go out of print). The principle I advocate is that publishers, if one must use them, should legally only be allowed to acquire those rights they specifically pay to use, as opposed to raking everything off the table, in front of an intimidated author, to whom they have traditionally postured themselves as being the only game in town, an idea whose demise has arrived with the New (digital) Publishing industry. The discussion also raises the well-known topic that publishers generally enjoy next to no brand recognition, unlike magazines (the blogger says)… (Paid Content.org 24 May 2011).