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Dangerous Places
a new collection of short fiction"Glasser’s funny and authoritative voice is that of a sage storyteller." -- Booklist
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The Good Men Foundation Book Project launched on November 1, 2009
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Amazon blinked this morning.
Amazon pulled Macmillan — e-books and paper–because Macmillan smelled blood in the water and circled in for a bite at more profit. Macmillan stood its ground. As of this morning, Amazon is selling Macmillan titles once again.
Anyone under the impression that publishing is a game for ladies and gentlemen with high artistic ambitions is invited for a swim in the shark tank.
Until two weeks ago, the only serious game in town for electronic distribution was Amazon’s Kindle. With the announcement that Apple and its iPad hadcast an eye on Amazon’s lunch, Macmillan stirred, smiled its biggest teeth, and asked, “Who is your Daddy?”
Amazon had set a price designed to push the Kindle into the market, creating a de facto monopoly. At ten bucks per Kindle title, a lot of readers were excited, publishers were thinking about moving to smaller quarters and writer—always at the bottom of the food chain—were asking their spouses to remind them exactly why they had just spent three years writing that book. Amazon was selling their work for less than it costs a family of four to dine at Mickey D’s.
Writers still need publishers, but it’s hard for this writer to be terribly sympathetic to the publisher’s despair at e-books. Those of us born prior to last week recollect when the publishing world boasted dozens of publishing houses (nearly all in Manhattan between Gramercy Park and 59th Street). But globalization has consolidated publishing in the US to a meager five corporations. Sorry, Bunky, you may think you see dozens of imprints on the spines of books, but 90 percent of all books are published by only a very few companies.
They are:
- Hachette Book Group (owned by French company Hachette Livre)
- HarperCollins
- Macmillan
- Penguin Group
- Random House (subsidiary of media conglomerate, Bertelsmann)
- Simon & Schuster
(with thanks to John Brown)
This is one sorry-ass state of affairs. Are you looking for book-people?
HarperCollins belongs to Rupert Murdoch— “nuff said.
S&S, wirh 20+ imprints (remember Atheneum? Pocket Books? Scribner?) is a subsidiary of National Amusements, a privately held company whose most lucrative assets are movie theaters.
The Penguin Group is really part of Pearson; if you want to know what a “group” looks like, take a peek at this Wikipedia page—go ahead, we won’t tell your teacher.
Bertelsmann, the book behemoth, is converting dollars to deutschemarks with titles from Knopf, Anchor, Doubleday, Dial Press and Modern Library, all companies once headquartered on the Eastside in the 50s (that’s how New Yorkers locate themselves).
Meanwhile, on the Internet, small presses grow like kudzu.
Izzat the future?
Watch this space.
Suppose you hanker to read the expose of John Edwards, presidential candidate, homemade porno-star, and general shit-heel. No one would blame you for not wanting to be seen in public buying this ephemeral bit of ordure, but if your plan was to read it on your Kindle or have it shipped in a plain brown box to your door from Amazon—you need a new plan.
For book people, that game this Sunday in Miami is the second most interesting competition around. Faster than a runaway Toyota, we are seeing the book biz rules rewritten by the imminent introduction of the iPad.
Once the only serious game in town, Amazon and its Kindle dictated the price for reader content, and at $10.00 per book, publishers saw their dreams of villas in Europe and Ivy League educations for their kids transform to damp rented condos at the Jersey Shore and Sallie Mae loan packages to attend State U.
But before a single iPad has been sold, on the mere threat of the announcement of a Kindle competitor, big-ass Apple has the book biz dancing like mice in electrified cages.
Earlier this week, Macmillan reopened talks with Amazon. The subject was its pricing policies. Macmillan wants more money.
Amazon retaliated. Oh, the temerity! It stopped selling all Macmillan titles. Not just e-books. If you want to find out how big a scumbag John Edwards really is, you may need to drive to a bookstore (don’t take the Toyota).
You might also try the third largest bookstore in the US: Books-A-Million which—oddly—is featuring Macmillan titles.
Amazon’s grief is just begun. It seems that another publisher, Hachette, is reopening talks with Amazon. Those are the French folks who bought Time-Warner and Little Brown.
Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, must feel like Darth Vader in the Death Star just as the Rebellion’s pesky Tie Fighters started buzzing around like gnats.
Writers are, for now, caught in the middle. After all, if you are a Macmillan author, the world’s largest bookstore is not selling your title; if Macmillan has just published your book, and you are in that critical first six weeks of sales, then you are hurting indeed. The business will shake out in the long run, with a better shake for readers who will have choices, and writers and publishers who will get more for their work, but in the short run, writers are getting squeezed.
That seems a damn shame.
It’s about publishing, stupid.
The forthcoming iPad vs Kindle war will have two definite winners—readers and publishers. The allies are taking sides quickly. The Wall Street Journal noted today that Apple is signing up textbook publishers, just as this column predicted just last week. And today’s NY Times notes that Amazon just scoped up a small company that manufactures…wait for it..wait for it…state of the art touch screens. What’s a Giant Kindle gonna cost?
The iPad is indeed a game-changer.
Textbooks are the golden river of publishing—forced sales of expensive books to an audience that renews annually, and in the Kindle division of Amazon they are slapping their foreheads…Color! Textbooks! Duuuuuuhhhh….what were we thinking?
So readers can expect in just months to be able to buy an electronic reading device at lower and lower prices—competition does that. Expect richer functionality, more bells and whistles to prop up a price point, and then collapsing prices. A lot is at stake: the electronic publishing industry last year took in $45 billion; what do you suppose it will take in once e-readers penetrate the market?
Remember the introduction of the iPod. Do you think the other players are going to stand with their hands in their pockets and allow Apple to develop another lucrative de facto monopoly? No question: readers come out winners.
Publishing comes up winners, too. For the past few years, chill winds have blown through mid-town Manhattan where publishing lives. The Kindle promised a bleak future for all those former English majors…but now, there will be competition for the product. When Amazon was the sole player, all electronic books cost $10.00. Publishers could take that price or leave it.
But with another player bidding for book rights….which way will the prices go? Expect “exclusives” and package deals as the e-book manufacturers vie for customers by bidding up what they will pay for the privilege of selling titles.
Readers need not worry—the cost of distributing e-media is so low that the price of books will hit a ceiling—somewhere near where publishers and writers all make enough money to compensate for their work, but without paying for the destruction of forests and toxic inks. Anyone in marketing with half a brain will be shooting for the youth market: next Christmas, the Complete Harry Potter or Twilight is going to be in a lot of brand new e-readers under a lot fo trees, and the set will cost a lot less than the print editions. Sfter that, our 12-yer-old reader will be downloading, and dowloading, and downloading….what right thinking Mom and Dad will deny their darling device that make reading fun and cool? and if they can get some sort of social networking onto the iPad or Kindle…Katie, bar the door, ’cause th habits of a generation are going to change.
The 500 lb. gorilla in the room is—as usual—Google. You remember Google…the search engine company that somehow became an advertizing company that now is making telephones. Oh, did I mention that are scanning everything ever written anywhere by anybody—and that it is searchable?
Will Google be supplying content to Amazon or Apple or…here’s a safe bet..are they thinking about ways to serve up their own? They own the books; they have the telephony systems…
Let the warfare begin.
Last week this column called the iPad a game-changer, and this morning’s news confirms that. It seems Macmillan Company, one of the five publishers left standing, is renegotiating its prices for electronic books with Amazon. Details are as yet unavailable, but you can be sure this is bad news for readers and better news for publishers.
There is gloom at Amazon. Once the only serious game in town, at $10 per book, it seems Macmillian will be partnering with Apple clout to raise the price to $12 – $15. This is not the way competition is supposed to go, but despite it’s anti-establishment ads and positioning itself as the computer company for the rest of us, Apple enjoys monopolistic pricing practices, and always has. Buy an Apple computer, you are into Apple printers. Once Apple monopolized the music business, songs went from $.99 to $1.29. Even Wal-Mart could not compete. The chubby uncool guy and the sleek tieless cool guy in the Apple ads both have teeth filed to points–it’s just that Apple has persuaded a generation of naive users into thinking they are hip while forking over 20 percent premiums.
Significantly, analysts under 40 fail to grasp the more significant story, which is that Apple has trained it eye on a new market segment. Actually, make that an old market segment.
Baby Boomers are the new black.
Having conquered the tattooed, pierced, over-medicated generation that knows no individual identity and breaks into cold sweats and loses sphincter control without constant connectivity, Steve Jobs and the innovative elves and designer fairies of Cupertino have noticed that the largest segment of the consumer population is still the Boomers.
Balding, sagging, wheezing, squinting and bewildered, Boomers are limping into old age with money in their pockets. Clueless, inept and RICH.
Hordes of geeks who spurn the iPad because it has no camera and does not allow multitasking need to take another dose of Ritalin and lie down. Breath slowly. The iPad is NOT FOR YOU. Just speed dial your therapist—a new ‘script will get you through the crisis. Being extricated from the universe’s center is relatively painless.
The iPad is not “just” a big iPhone, nor is it a hot piece of technology for which goons without lives will line up to buy before its release. The price point is designed to seduce the technologically less-savvy into taking a plunge. Steve Jobs is selling digital crack to Boomers—and they are going to like it. The iPad is an inexpensive device large enough for failing eyes to read, watch a video, and store handsome pictures of the grandkids. It fits in a briefcase or big purse. There is going to be a market in neoprene shoulder slings.
Boomers are tired of paying $30.00 for bad books; they are weary of chain bookstores that are incapable to catering to niche markets. They are tired of bookstore clerks who do not read. They want the community that is online—they now will have the device that makes access easy.
Publishing will be wiped out in about the same amount of time it took the iPod to blow up the music business. After that, TV is not far behind.
Feel the temblor?
Who will buy the iPad?
People who read and are passive consumers of information in the form of text and graphics—but not producers of those forms. The stripped price has to do with making the iPad an output device, not input. Not even a camera is included. If you want to take snapshots of videos of your vacation or sweetie, get a camera–or an iPhone, or an iTouch.
Nope, the iPad is strictly for output. Sure, there is a dock for a keyboard, but if you want to write anything longer than a letter, tweet, or a blog entry–best use your computer.
The iPad looks superior to SONY or Kindle readers for look and feel, and it’s large enough for video, even full-length films, without being ridiculous to middle-aged eyes. Apple’s low price is geared toward the non-gadget types, not the kids who stood online to get their iPhone.
Apple has the clout and rep to create a market, as they did with music, that will soon be followed by a store that will consolidate books, magazines, etc into instant, ecologically sound distribution. The platform problems now inhibiting th growth of electronic books will end.
If Apple gets the textbook market, they will make billions. What do you suppose a decent anatomy book costs a medical student—think of the color plates. Now let the student download the text for $50. How about lawyers carrying around entire, searchable, law libraries in their brief cases?
One of the reasons early reviews express doubt is that younger power users writing the reviews tend to be less “bookish,” but the iPad is the device that will bring back reading, and it will do so by de-emphasizing connectivity.
Thank God. We’ll be alone with our thoughts–again.
Make no mistake, this is a game-changer.
Caroline Leavitt reviews Dangerous Places Caroline Leavittville
from Lighted Windows
“One New Year’s, near four in the morning, after a party, I stop for coffee. Cafeteria in Brooklyn. I’m done, walk out through the revolving door, this Hispanic woman in a red dress runs by so fast she almost knocks me down. Her dress sparkles. All sequins. Low cut. She has an enormous chest and she bounces when she runs. She’s no kid. Maybe forty-five, maybe even fifty. The dress is slit up the back, but only so far. She has to run from the knees down. And she’s barefoot, except for stockings, the seams thick as your little finger. Thing is, she can’t lift her hem to run faster because both her hands are clapped over her face and there’s a web of blood flowing through her fingers down her wrists to her elbows. All I see over her hands is her black eyes, wide. This is a flash. Like a strobe photo. She gets past me and makes it to the center of Church Avenue. Cars on both sides of her. New Year’s morning and she’s in the middle of four lanes, shivering on the double yellow centerline. She is screaming.
“A guy in a robin’s egg blue tuxedo, black velvet lapels, comes tearing around the same corner. Bandito mustache. Hair slick. He runs in patent leather shoes with the big silver buckles, no easy trick on a frozen sidewalk. Pink shirt, all ruffles down the front. He holds the knife way out in front of him. Biggest damn thing I ever saw. The handle is red, probably plastic. All down his tuxedo sleeve, all over his pink shirt cuff, are streamers of blood.
“He catches her right there on the double yellow line. She screams ‘Dios, por favor, Esteban, por favor,’ then just shrieks, no words, one bare foot stamping the ground as she holds her hands out to him, her face all running blood.
“Four more guys wearing matching tuxedos tear around the corner. …
from The Veldt
…Breakfast prepared by Lillian comes with the frequency of a solar eclipse–rare, but not impossible, spectacular when it happens. Lillian has spooned Dundee Orange Marmalade and Polander’s All Fruit Strawberry into tiny twin cylindrical clear acrylic containers. She has folded napkins to triangles. Their cotton tablecloth is arrogantly spotless. They sip orange juice from squat, genuine juice glasses. The Levy’s white oak kitchen table overlooks their garden. New autumn air wafts their pale green café curtains.
This is better than the Marriott, he thinks.
The fact is that Lillian Levy rarely cooks; Lillian Levy defrosts, opens or pours. Their pizza and Thai place are both on speed dial, and the drivers know their way to the Levy home despite a complicated route through dark suburban streets and unmarked winding lanes. Lillian Levy won’t clean, can’t sew, and only vaguely knows the uses of an iron. When it is her turn to do laundry, she occasionally forgets to separate whites from darks. Still, the wife he adores can describe three uses for a vacuum cleaner, none of which involve carpets or dust, two of which are not recommended for children. As if by compensation or default–Samson could not say which–Lillian has made her reputation as a Big Thinker, the Vice-President and Director of Communications for the Bates Foundation, the charitable trust improving the lives of inner city children and their mothers through entrepreneurial investment.
Not yet registered for unemployment benefits, Samson clings to what he knows is a delusion; the phone will ring to summon him back, perhaps with a raise, compensation for the terrible mistake and injustice the company perpetrated. He’s mentally rehearsing his gracious and forgiving acceptance speech when movement in the tall grass at the edge of their yard catches his eye. Something out there lives, a dangerous place for anything wild. He peers at the spot.
The thing at the edge of their garden veers his mind to last night’s dream. It assaults his memory sharp as a whiff of ammonia. The dream is an old friend. He has had it many times. Sexually sated, as his body last night sank into torpor, he lay on his back and drifted in and out of his otherworld.
Bent and hurried, Lillian hunkers down in front of him. They must run. Run. Get away. Run. Run. The grass is dangerously dry. Lillian is naked. Something is out there. Something comes for them. Run. They need to make the trees. For safety’s sake, they need to make the trees. Run. Run. Stay low, and run.
By an act of will, he pulls himself back to the present. “Family week was a good idea,” he says. Last week, while the boys began their first full days of school, Samson and Lillian were like teenagers with over-trusting absent parents. They did it on the stairs, in the shower, and once, when Lillian snuck up on him, in the garage. They’d polished the hood of their car. How will he tell her he has no job?
from An Age of Marvels and Wonders
Two days before she follows me home, the short woman stands ahead of me in the checkout aisle. She is short like you could put her in your pocket, but she is hardly a dwarf. Just short. She glares at me. She says, “No,” biting off the word, bitter on her tongue.
The cashier is none too happy with me, either.
I offer the short woman money because I’m hoping that for five or ten dollars I can save myself thirty minutes and score points with God. I am not looking for some medieval indulgence here, no Get Out of Purgatory Free card, but just maybe if the Good Lord wills it, a small miracle, say some July day my sandals might be guided past the bubblegum. All I want is to pay for my Muenster cheese, the soft kind. It will go with the unpretentious Riesling chilling in my refrigerator at home. I like the tapered neck of the brown bottle. The label with the milkmaid and the cat and the woodcutter pleases my eye. On impulse, I’ve picked up some Rye Crisps, something to vary from my usual Ritz. Rye Crisps: my low-threshold adventure of the week.
My entire purchase is my entire dinner: cheese, crackers and a glass of sweet yellow, German wine. Maybe two glasses. My doctor would kill me about the cheese. She’d give me a long, scary lecture. Then I’d go home and regret I had not bought a creamier Camembert.
The short woman is not slow. She pushed a full cart to the register, and she took only a minute or two to empty it, her hands darting swift as nesting birds. She’s entitled to the time; I am not impatient; I have no place to go and no one waits for me. The only problem is she doesn’t have enough money.
The cart also contains her kids. They ride with the groceries. That’s not unusual. Lots of people do that. It’s a long sight better than the ones who lash the kids to their wrists with clothesline. These two might be a boy and a girl; it’s hard to be certain. One wears a pink nylon jacket and the other wears a blue nylon jacket. You don’t need to be Charlie Chan to figure this family out. The boy is four, tops, closer to three. The girl, maybe six. The frayed stitching on the jackets’ quilting is unraveling, and on the girl’s chest a dirty tuft of the fill leaks. The kid picks at it like it was a polyp. Beneath their unzipped jackets they wear candy-colored striped T-shirts and generic jeans with lots of room to grow, the cuffs rolled up. They are roiling around on each other, squirming, needy, whiny and loud. Their identical black knit hats stretch almost over their eyes, and they both have thick-knit maroon mittens clipped to the sleeve ends. Outside in early March, it is still cold enough to mist breath, but inside? There’s no need for woolen hats, so both kids are pink with heat and shine with sweat. They have crusty, chapped running noses and what might be the glistening remains of a couple of purloined lime lollipops rimming their lips. They strain to touch their mother. The boy says, “Uppie uppie uppie uppie,” a shrill mantra that in the past must have got him lifted into his mother’s arms. It doesn’t work right now. On and on he goes, like a dentist’s drill through Novocain. The girl’s sticky hands pull at her mother’s breast, yielding beneath a stained yellow sweatshirt. The neckline stretches; we all see the pink strap of Mom’s ratty bra and the delicate line of her clavicle under translucent skin….
I don’t try to be judgmental, but ever since Dr. Feldman told me that macular degeneration would sooner or later leave me blind, I see more. It is one thing to be in the world; it is another to see it. What I do not see, I fill in. It amuses me. The blank spots in my eyesight may spread, but the mind supplies superior vision…
Look at the short mother, for another. Payment is due. $177.58 worth of groceries. She is down to searching for coins. Most of us want to avert our eyes at such a time; we read checkout aisle literature—pondering the aliens that despite monitoring TV and radio broadcasts for generations, choose not to appear to world leaders in the company of diplomatic envoys, but instead taunt us by causing cellulite, arthritis and the rare form of leukemia that puts boys in bubbles; we read about the talking dog in Guatemala that in perfect English has predicted the end of the world for Tuesday next; we’re enchanted by winners of the genetic lottery for whom fame and fortune does nothing but plunge them into heartbreak and life-dramas filled with pathos so much more acute than our own, suffering the curse of being gorgeous, talented, or God-forbid rich. We wonder what the fifteen secret new ways to have sex that are guaranteed to keep a man faithful could be. Where is this research conducted? How long has it been going on? Can they use a near blind 62-year-old subject? Are we certain the camp followers of Caesar’s legions were ignorant of these techniques? How about the courtesans who flourished in the Kremlin at the time of Catherine the Great? Fourteenth-century geishas? Have they checked the carvings on Hindu temples in Burma? Fifteen new sex techniques. Think of it.
Oh, we are lucky to live in an Age of Marvels and Wonders, an age of daily miracles that inexplicably cannot ascertain why fatty deposits swell behind the retina. Maybe the aliens know, but choose not to tell us. Perhaps they are the cause. Perhaps we should journey to Guatemala to ask the dog.
