More on the World of Tomorrow

With Borders no longer with us and digital sales comprising more and more of the market, I thought now would be a good time to revisit how these trends have evolved over time and where they might lead over the next few years.

First, while I don't think there's much of a physical future for magazines and newspapers, I do think there will always be a market for physical books. (I think magazines will go entirely digital over the next decade, with existing name brands already finding some success—the New Yorker has made a cool $1 million with their iPad app.)

The market for physical and used books five and ten years from now will certainly be smaller than it is today, and my expectation is that most physical media will eventually be found only in libraries. Independent and used book stores will, I believe, remain in business, but I think by the end of this decade almost all new books—almost certainly all new fiction—will be produced and consumed electronically.

Categories such as coffee table/art books and children's books will probably take longer to make this transition.

Second, I expect a continuation of a phenomenon which I predicted last November: the resurgence of the independent book store. Will indies control as much of the market as they did before the chains took up residence in the 1980s? I don't think so. But I do think there is a demand for physical books and that there are dollars to be had, and many areas that have lost Borders locations may well turn to independents to supply their books.

Also, as I've mentioned before, the independent book store is the go-to location for author readings, book signings, community events, open mic nights, and in-person browsing. Try as they might, online vendors can't replicate these advantages.

Finally, while I'm not sure how Amazon and Barnes & Noble are going to develop as competitors, I think that each will have to offer a spate of unique—perhaps proprietary—perks and technological advantages in order for them to coexist. Right now Barnes & Noble's primary advantage is its physical retail space, but I don't know how long that will continue to be the case. The further we trek into digital territory, the more important the Nook and e-book sales will be to B&N, and the less appealing it will be for the company to maintain its warehouse, shipping, and storefront infrastructures.

What do you think, mes auteurs?

The Vanishing Advance

You may have been hearing about this from other publishing professionals or from fellow writers, mes auteurs, but in case you haven't heard, the average advance has declined a bit over the past couple of years. Much of my evidence for this is either proprietary or anecdotal, so hopefully there are a few literary agents or editors in the house to confirm the trend.

In case you're curious, though, there are a few reasons I think lower advances have been—and continue to be—the norm.

Belt-tightening. With forbidding economic indicators such as unemployment still high and talk of a double-dip recession floating around, editors and publishers have become much more frugal in terms of the advances they offer. Many have modified their P&Ls to reflect current sell-through and consumer habits, and decreased demand for physical books has resulted in decreased up-front cash for authors.

Publishing is a business, and we've got to try to make money on as many books as possible in order to stay in business. Speaking of physical media, another reason (à mon avis) for lower advances is:

The shift to electronic media. Because e-books don't face the same kind of supply chain/distribution challenges as physical books and are not returnable, it's easier for publishers to run P&Ls for e-books and to simply offer higher royalties than to stick with the advance model.

True, the vast majority of titles currently acquired are eventually released as concurrent physical and electronic books, but I don't think the day is long off in which a substantial section of the market will comprise e-only titles. Once that occurs, I think the idea of the advance will become even more antiquated; it's much easier to pay an author a fixed percentage of dollars earned in the more or less real-time environment of e-book sales than to bother with advances.

In fact, much (though certainly not all) of the work done by advances is obviated by the fact that:

Advertising and marketing budgets for e-books are often lower than for physical books. While a publishing house—particularly a large one—will pay the advertising and marketing costs for their lead titles, there are many midlist titles and titles published by smaller publishers for which the burden of lining up media and marketing falls squarely on the author. The advance is a way of mitigating this hardship; authors can use the money given to them by publishers to pay to promote their books (e.g. conduct book tours, create book trailers, and so on).

As advertising and marketing have become easier and cheaper—predominantly by way of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter—the cost of promoting books through these channels has necessarily also fallen. If publishers feel they can pay less money for the same commercial success from any given title, they absolutely will. Wouldn't you?

So that, dear readers, is my take on why average advances seem to be declining in this industry. It may be a relatively short-term reaction to the continuing economic uncertainty inherent in the recession, or (as I believe) a long-term reaction to the drastic changes that are occuring in the publishing industry as it transitions from physical to electronic media. Regardless of which, I think it signals an industry-wide recognition of the challenges the business is facing.

What do you think, gentle readers?

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

No post this Friday, mes auteurs. Stay tuned for our week of guest posts starting Monday, May 30th!

This Is My Shocked Face

Hot on the heels of yesterday's post about the greater e-book market, word has it that HarperCollins is attributing their drop in paperback sales to sales of e-book editions, reporting that "the mass-market paperback is the thing we're going to cannibalise most."

British spellings of "cannibalize" notwithstanding, let me just say: I'm 0% surprised by this.

I feel for you, J.E. Medrick (see yesterday's comments), but as I've said before, I just don't see how the mass market format can survive over the next five or so years.

The mass market paperback offers the following:

· Low price point;
· Relative portability;
· Higher disposability (readers are more willing to chuck a mass market paperback than a trade paperback or hardcover);
· Wide availability (book stores, grocery stores, department stores, drug stores, &c).

The e-book offers the following:

· Low (on average) price point (and getting lower);
· High portability;
· High disposability (though you wouldn't need to, since e-book files occupy no physical and very little digital space);
· Wide availability (at least in the United States).

Additionally, both formats are dominated by adult (as opposed to children's) fiction and cater to similar audiences (middle-aged women).

I think once the price of e-readers (specifically the Kindle) consistently drops below the $100 mark, mass market paperback sales will start taking a real beating. To my mind, the only barrier to the complete cannibalization of mass market paperback sales by electronic books—in the United States, anyway—is the price of the e-reading device; remove that, and there's no reason to keep the mass market around. Print runs of any real quantity will rapidly become a waste of money, and I don't think anyone would really want a POD mass market paperback when they could just as easily get a POD trade paperback.

While I do think the mass market will physically exist for longer than five years, I think that existence will be limited to personal libraries and used book stores.

What do you think, ladies and gentlebros?

Three Cups of Baloney

That title actually grossed me out a little more than I expected. My apologies.

In case you haven't heard, mes auteurs, it's looking like Greg Mortenson may have made up a lot of stuff in his books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools, and now Jon Krakauer is calling him out on it. (You can download Krakauer's .pdf book, Three Cups of Deceit, for free for a limited time.)

The problem of partially fabricated memoirs isn't new to the industry; you probably remember Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences, which was found to be totally fraudulent not long after it was published, as well as the much more infamous "memoir" by James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, which was also (much) less than honest (the Daily Beast mentions both here).

Now, the allegations of fiscal misappropriation against Mortenson aside—as I think that's a very different, and far more serious, question—do you think it matters if the/a story is true or not? Does "memoir" mean "fact," or does it mean "how I remember it, which may or may not be super true"?

If this seriously offends/bothers you (it seriously offends/bothers me), what do you think publishers can do to remedy the situation (besides the easy and vague answer of "do a better job of fact-checking")? What actions should be taken against house and author, and should/how can we differentiate between memoirs that are "mostly true," "somewhat true," "fraudulent," &c &c?

Theories, questions, and diatribes in the comments!

Panic! at the Library

As part of my ongoing coverage of the astounding (and often strange) turns the publishing industry is taking as it shifts from paper-based to electronic media, I bring you this, mes auteurs: The Consumerist's report that HarperCollins is capping e-book loans at 26 check-outs. If a library purchases a HarperCollins e-book, they can only lend it 26 times before it "expires" and the library must purchase a new license from the publisher.

This is, à mon avis, completely nuts for several reasons.

First, the idea of forced obsolescence is probably so repugnant to most librarians that, rather than buy and re-buy the same e-book over and over, they're probably just not going to purchase HarperCollins e-books.

The publisher seems to be betting on librarians' collective fear that if they don't stock their e-books, patrons will simply buy e-books on-line and the libraries won't be able to justify their continued existence. If there's a way to breed ill will among your customers (that is, the librarians actually purchasing books for their libraries), this is it.

Second, the number 26 seems completely arbitrary to me. I'm not privy to any of the logistical tinkering or number-crunching the folks at HarperCollins did in order to arrive at this figure, but it seems to me (and you can see from the video in the article) that physical books last much longer than 26 check-outs (and I can tell you from experience that they consistently survive many more).

It's possible that this is an average number that takes into account all the books that go on shelves and are never or rarely checked out, left to rot over a fifty-year period with only a couple of loans. If that's the case, though, libraries would chuck the book when it became unusable and would probably not buy a new one, since no one wanted the original to begin with.

If a publisher is going to enforce a loan cap, I think it 1.) needs to be much higher than 26 (based entirely on my uninformed opinion), and 2.) should vary depending on the work in question. Harry Potter and the Seven Figure Advance is going to be borrowed a lot more often than Actuarial Mathematics for Dummies, and the loan cap should reflect this.

Finally, the whole reason the loan cap exists is as an analogue to the wear and tear suffered by physical books that eventually need replacing. I think one of the most destructive tendencies inherent to the publishing industry is not its resistance to electronic media, but its slavish insistence on making them exactly like physical media.

Instead of panicking over a perceived loss in revenues caused by books that no longer need to be replaced, publishers should be touting the non-physical nature of e-books as a tremendous boon: "You'll never need to replace this e-book! That means that rather than buy a new copy of the same book, you can spend the money you'll save on more of our e-books."

E-books don't take up physical shelf space, so the limiting factor that once forced a librarian to choose between replacing a popular title that's worn out and purchasing a different title—that is, space—no longer exists. More titles sold is good for everyone.

My rant is over for today, meine Autoren, but what do you think? Should publishers be able to cap library loans, and if so, is 26 a reasonable number?

Terms to Know: Returns (Rerun)

A small blast from the recent past, mes auteurs. Round up on Friday and a return to the topic of marketing/brand management on Monday! — E

Episode: "Terms to Know: Returns"
Originally aired: Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

It's been awhile since I've gone back to the basics, mes auteurs, so today's post is on that bête noire of the publishing world: returns.

The book business differs from most other commercial enterprises in that stock sold by the content provider (publisher) to retailers (book stores) is 100% returnable: if a book store can't sell its stock to consumers, it sends it right back to the house.

This is a holdover from Depression-era economics designed to get retailers to take books under circumstances they normally wouldn't (i.e., by drastically reducing, if not totally erasing, their exposure to risk). With the exception of a very small number of select retailers ("special markets" that don't sell books as their primary product), all retailers are allowed to return unsold stock to the publisher.

What does this mean for you, dear authors?

Well, assuming you earn out your advance, it can (partially) explain why it takes publishers awhile to calculate your royalties, as the returns reduce their gross sales (billing, or the money they made by selling stock to retailers) to net sales. If your royalty structure takes this into account, the publisher needs to wait for returns to come back before issuing you a check.

Occasionally, a publisher will even withhold money against future returns in a kind of escrow account, which means that money that is technically yours won't be paid out until returns are calculated several months down the line.

Granted, the problem could be "fixed" by moving the industry en masse back to a firm sale model (that is, no returns), but even if something like that could be done (which seems doubtful—see below), all it would mean would be a sharp reduction in stock for début and midlist authors like yourselves. If you force the stores to take on their own risk in today's bookselling environment, they'll simply cut their orders for anything that isn't a sure thing (read: James Patterson and Sarah Palin).

The good news is, cats & kittens, that it soon won't matter whether physical books are returnable because the market will shift principally to e-books over the next decade. Problems pertaining to physical books that plague today's publishers and retailers—warehouse space, shipping and return costs, physical co-op, &c—don't and won't apply to e-books, so returns will become a thing of the past and you'll get your royalty statements faster. Some of you who have successfully published e-books already know this.

In short: yes, returns are a pain, and yes, the industry has been running on an outmoded and inefficient sales model for the past 80 years. At this point, however, it isn't worth changing: as e-books become the primary format for the written (and read) word, the issue will become more or less moot.

That said: if you're planning on publishing a book this decade, plan on getting a call from your agent at some point asking if you'd like to buy your returned/remaindered units at cost. And don't be surprised if your royalty statements, should you get any, take their sweet time arriving in your mailbox.

Tomorrow: Thanksgiving festivities begin, meine Autoren, so I'll be taking a short break. We'll be back with the return of genre sales breakdowns on Monday, November 29th!

This Is A Business: Redux

I first made this point a little over a year ago, gentle readers, but it bears repeating.

The other day I overheard a conversation in which one book-loving acquaintance of mine expressed the opinion that selling e-books amounts to a betrayal of the physical book.

Let me be the first to say: this a bunch of maudlin nonsense.

The book business is precisely that, mes auteurs: a business. Yes, in many instances we're selling art, but I've always been of the opinion that the art of the book is almost always found in its content, not in its form; if a majority of consumers want their books electronically, any publisher or bookseller resisting that change will likely be driven out of business. If it sounds Darwinian, that's because it is. If you're not selling what people want, you're not going to be in business very long.

This isn't at all to say that the physical book is going extinct (though hardcover fiction may, à mon avis, be more or less gone within a few years)—I'm only saying that refusing to cultivate an electronic platform or sell e-books due to the misguided notion that you're somehow betraying an inanimate cultural medium is, well, childish. Books aren't people; they don't have feelings. Those who really love them will buy and sell them in whatever format is available.

The book is very old, cats & kittens, but before we had them we had scrolls and before that we had tablets and before that we had oral traditions. The codex—a book with a cover and pages—hasn't been around forever and it won't be around forever, and the sooner publishers, booksellers, and other industry insiders realize this and not only accommodate but embrace the changes that are revolutionizing the way people read, the better.

Guest Post: Print is Killing Publishing

by Joseph L. Selby

Whether you love the smell of paper books or not, digital distribution will be the primary means of accessing text-based media within your lifetime (unless you die in the next couple years; if so, my condolences). Three years ago I was in a meeting of department heads and vice presidents and all the people that make decisions on things. We were discussing the company's ebook strategy. Three years ago, Flashpaper was relatively new and xml-ebooks were in their first iteration. We were on the precipice of massive change, not that such changes were noticeable in the market.

We're now over the precipice, in case you're wondering. We're falling. Argue all you want that you prefer paper. We'll hit the bottom soon enough and paper will become the minority distribution method for published media.

Flashpaper seems like old hat now. XML is realized (not fully, as we continue to experiment with enhanced ebooks). HTML5 and CSS3 are the vanguard of the mobile revolution, where computers play second hat to smart phones and tablets. The entire publishing paradigm is shifting and those companies that deal with text-based media are trying to figure out how to handle such a rapidly changing market.

At this meeting of mine, standing at the precipice, we discussed the marketplace, the challenges of digital sales, and most importantly, the challenge of pricing. I asked what I thought was a simple enough question: Why don't we just sell content directly to the consumer?

Now at the time, ebooks represented less than 1% of total sales. MUCH less. The industry moneymaker at the time (and currently, though not for much longer) was paper books. Paper books sold in stores and online at Amazon. A book's marketing budget was much smaller than what was needed to force any one particular title to the forefront of the consumer consciousness. So much of the business depended on customers finding the books while looking for other items. (You know the "people who browsed this item also looked at X, Y, Z" suggestions on Amazon? Those are a big deal.)

The answer was as simple as the question: We can't sell directly to customers because it will upset the market. Cutting out the middleman would rock the boat for the much larger revenue generator.

In truth, the answer isn't so simple. The excuse was simple. There are too many challenges to selling directly that publishing isn't willing to tackle. How do you set up a marketplace? Which department owns it and maintains it? Will this require new staff and the costs that go along with them? How does a marketplace work? (I cannot express to you the number of meetings I had to have with directors and VPs explaining what meta-text and catalog searching is.) How do you handle international sales? How do you draw users to your market without the goods of other publishers that are offered in the collective of a place like Amazon? How do you establish industry market standards without provoking (more) anti-trust accusations? How do you sell books?

Did you catch that last one? How do you sell books? Publishers are really good at selling books to the market. Publishers are not very good at selling books to the consumer. The industry grew up in cooperation with the marketplace, not in opposition to it. Publishers do not have the staff, the institutional knowledge, or the will to bring anything but a marginal effort to bear when it comes to direct selling.

How does that affect you and me? You get the agency model of ebook selling. Ebooks cost as much as their hard-back brethren because the cost still accommodates the middle man. Rather than a 50/50 split between author and publisher, the whole thing is muddled by including a third party to act as a literary fence.

With the inclusion of self-publishing arms like CreateSpace and fourth-party catalogs like Smashwords, marketplace e-bookshelves are less accommodating than ever for browsing. There aren't enough ways to hone searches aside from direct keyword searches. If you want to see fantasy, you get sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. And a LOT of it. And a lot of that, self-published. Sure Tor might not represent 100% of the fantasy market, but when you trace so many of the imprints up to their parent corporations, you'd be surprised how many of them are owned by the same people (Penguin owns at least four different fantasy imprints. Macmillan at least three, and so on). Bundle all these titles into a top-notch database driven search engine, slap a nice marketplace on the front of it, and all of a sudden you don't need to charge $17.50 for an ebook. You can charge $10 and make more money than you ever did before.

With the rapidly changing distribution paradigm, the obligations of playing nice with the market because of print will soon be meaningless. The problem is, by the time that happens, the publishing industry will have given up any opportunity it had to establish itself as a market option for readers of its work, will have allowed Amazon to muscle its way to control the industry despite spats with Macmillan (which I still contend Amazon won despite [or because of] the application of the agency model to ebook pricing [something that will bite publishers in the ass]).

The game is being played while we fall. When we hit the bottom, the game ends, the new era of publishing begins. The question is, who will get up and walk away? If things remain as they are now, Amazon WILL be the victor. If decisive action is not taken, publishers, authors, and customers alike will lie broken and bloodied at the foot of the Cliffs of E-sanity.

But do not despair. Others have seen the chess match being played and have begun to work toward an endgame. Do you remember that huff on Black Friday/Cyber Monday when a major publisher offered 50% off direct online purchases? It undercut any sales independents might have made on the same day. While the uproar was in defense of the independents, this sale was a critical step in the outcome of the ePocalypse. Publishers need to not only attempt but succeed at selling their product directly to consumers. While there are plenty of horror scenarios of publishers maintaining their own marketplace (same pricing, same piddly author e-royalties, and no middle man?), the risk is necessary for the fruitful transition of the industry from paper to electrons. It is necessary for publishers to treat authors fairly by offering a reasonable royalty rate. It is necessary for publishers to treat customers fairly by not charging $17 for an ebook or by attempting to explain why an ebook is worth $17 when they already lost that battle (twice in fact, but that's a separate blog post). It is necessary for publishers to maintain themselves in a world of reduced revenue and growing publishing alternatives.

Joseph L. Selby is a fantasist seeking representation. From 9:30 to 5:00 he works as a media project manager for one of the big 6's education division (translation: he makes the ebooks). He blogs at http://jlselby.blogspot.com.

Announcements!

As 2010 winds down, mes auteurs, I'd like to take this opportunity to do three things: one, sincerely thank you for reading and commenting on this, my tiny fiefdom in the vast feudal system that is the Internet; two, wish you a happy holiday season and a felicitous new year; and three, make a couple of announcements.

First: I dislike ads and so will not be adding them to PMN in the foreseeable future (they would annoy you and wouldn't make me much money).

However! I have, as a result of my perpetual sales mindset, been considering adding other monetizing features to the blog (such as a $0.99 – $1.99 e-book or two with exclusive content, or a Zazzle-type storefront). I'm not sure how much you need Shakespeare "O Snappe" t-shirts or PMN coffee mugs, buttons, and mousepads, but if there's demand, I'm all about the supply.

Second: There will be significant upgrades to the website in the first half of 2011. Stay tuned!

Third: There will be another call for guest posts in the near future. Stay even more tuned!

Fourth: There are now 365 PMN posts—one for every day of the year! Now that I think of it, maybe I should make a PMN page-a-day calendar...

Fourth: Any theories, ideas, suggestions, thoughts, vitriol, praise, articles of propoganda, and/or grand revelations on the above topics (or any topics, really) should go in the comments. Make haste! It's almost THE FUTURE!

Terms to Know: Returns

350th post! Hooray! — E

It's been awhile since I've gone back to the basics, mes auteurs, so today's post is on that bête noire of the publishing world: returns.

The book business differs from most other commercial enterprises in that stock sold by the content provider (publisher) to retailers (book stores) is 100% returnable: if a book store can't sell its stock to consumers, it sends it right back to the house.

This is a holdover from Depression-era economics designed to get retailers to take books under circumstances they normally wouldn't (i.e., by drastically reducing, if not totally erasing, their exposure to risk). With the exception of a very small number of select retailers ("special markets" that don't sell books as their primary product), all retailers are allowed to return unsold stock to the publisher.

What does this mean for you, dear authors?

Well, assuming you earn out your advance, it can (partially) explain why it takes publishers awhile to calculate your royalties, as the returns reduce their gross sales (billing, or the money they made by selling stock to retailers) to net sales. If your royalty structure takes this into account, the publisher needs to wait for returns to come back before issuing you a check.

Occasionally, a publisher will even withhold money against future returns in a kind of escrow account, which means that money that is technically yours won't be paid out until returns are calculated several months down the line.

Granted, the problem could be "fixed" by moving the industry en masse back to a firm sale model (that is, no returns), but even if something like that could be done (which seems doubtful—see below), all it would mean would be a sharp reduction in stock for début and midlist authors like yourselves. If you force the stores to take on their own risk in today's bookselling environment, they'll simply cut their orders for anything that isn't a sure thing (read: James Patterson and Sarah Palin).

The good news is, cats & kittens, that it soon won't matter whether physical books are returnable because the market will shift principally to e-books over the next decade. Problems pertaining to physical books that plague today's publishers and retailers—warehouse space, shipping and return costs, physical co-op, &c—don't and won't apply to e-books, so returns will become a thing of the past and you'll get your royalty statements faster. Some of you who have successfully published e-books already know this.

In short: yes, returns are a pain, and yes, the industry has been running on an outmoded and inefficient sales model for the past 80 years. At this point, however, it isn't worth changing: as e-books become the primary format for the written (and read) word, the issue will become more or less moot.

That said: if you're planning on publishing a book this decade, plan on getting a call from your agent at some point asking if you'd like to buy your returned/remaindered units at cost. And don't be surprised if your royalty statements, should you get any, take their sweet time arriving in your mailbox.

Tomorrow: Thanksgiving festivities begin, meine Autoren, so I'll be taking a short break. We'll be back with the return of genre sales breakdowns on Monday, November 29th!

The Un-E-Bookable

I know you occasionally grow weary of my e-scapades, meine Freunde, so I thought I'd break in a brand-new week with something unprecedented on PMN: a post on the un-e-bookable! Specifically, Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel, Tree of Codes.

The Vanity Fair article/interview (linked above) calls the book "a spare, haunting story that appears to hang in negative space" and "very, very cool." Safran Foer created the book by strategically cutting passages out of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, meaning the book is die-cut throughout. That also means that, at $40.00, it's probably the most expensive fiction trade paperback on the market now. While "very, very cool," is it forty dollars cool? Or even Amazon's $26.40 cool?

I've seen the book, mes auteurs (more via hook than by crook), and I must say: I'm actually not super impressed. It could be because I saw a much-handled galley whose pages no longer lined up properly, but the story seemed less to me spare and haunting than jumbled and contrived. Yes, I know it's cool to hate on JSF, but believe me, I'm not hating—I loved Everything is Illuminated and was charmed by Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I just think this book is less a testament to good writing (or, I suppose, editing) than it is to how confident publishers are in the JSF brand.

Then again, like I said, it's possible the copy I had wasn't in the best shape. I'll browse at a certain local indie and, if sufficiently impressed, will use my "one free paperback" coupon to the fullest.

To be clear: I'm glad to see a new book (by a major author) that takes full advantage of its physical existence, and un-e-bookable titles like this one help—at least, for the foreseeable future—to guarantee the relevance of the printed page for years to come. To quote the man himself:

I started thinking about what books look like, what they will look like, how the form of the book is changing very quickly. If we don’t give it a lot of thought, it won’t be for the better. There is an alternative to e-books. And I just love the physicality of books.

I do agree; there is an alternative to e-books, and this "book-as-sculptural objec[t]" (again quoting the article) is one of them. Whether it will be popular enough to maintain interest in physical books is debatable, and again quoting Safran Foer (in response to "In this increasingly digital age, do you see a project like this... as one way to preserve the printed page?"):

Not really. These decisions are going to be democratic. This book is simply not going to find a big audience. It’s naïve to think it would. I’m not really interested in resisting what’s going on, even though I have strong ideas about what a good book is. It’s possible to make things that aren’t just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.

Safran Foer is right: this book won't find a big audience (relative to his usual crowd), and were it coming from any other author, it would be virtually unsalable (although some would argue it's virtually unsalable as-is! Get it? Oh man, I crack me up). Again, however, I agree that there are going to be alternatives to e-books in the future, and while the democratic force of the Reading Public will push the e-format more and more forcefully as time goes on, I'm convinced there will always be a place in the market for books as objets d'art.