behavior. i'm getting a green sign telling me it's over. thank you very much. scott [applause] >> thank you very much. general zinni will be in the dining area, the mad inciting area number one just to the right of the student union as you go outside. his books are available out friends and they're also available at the signing area. please go to our website and fill out the survey of this session and this festival. thank you very much for coming. ..

and the conclusion of retired general anthony zinni's discussion of his latest book, "leading the change." we will take a break and then return in about two hours with our last program from the tuscon festival of books that begins at 7 p.m. eastern and features former "baltimore sun" white house correspondent lynn olson discussing her book world war ii citizens of london. [inaudible conversations] book editors discuss the future of publishing including digital books. the panelists include richard

eoin nash of soft skull books and colin robinson publisher of verso books and the new press. the mevel house of brooklyn hosts this 90 minute even to. >> good evening. i'm dennis johnson, the co publisher of millhouse and would like to welcome you here for the third event in our publishing in the age of blah, blah, blah series that talks about different aspects of change in what is obviously have a historic moment in the history of book publishing. the conversation so far was being controlled by conglomerate types and device makers and retailers and gadget heads but precious few card makers and political muckrakers, the kind of people we like here. so this series of talks from an

independent perspective. in fact, let me update you. next week we are doing another in the series that was supposed to happen last week but snowmageddon happened. next week we're doing a talk on the future of a book on a pro tosh -- reprove wash with journalism undergoing such a great change with their literary journalism where people read about books and authors and publishers in the future, where it reviews in portent etc., etc.. that is here next thir stay at 7 p.m. and features michael miller from timeout new york, jason boo, ted from ebook, john mutter and laura miller from salon.com. it's going to be talk next week thursday at 7 p.m.. and tonight's episode we are

discussing the publishing house of the future, what it may or may not look like. we had a great glimpse of some relevant possibilities just last week when war broke out between amazon not, and several of the world's biggest publishers over pricing models for e-books and most accounts publishers want, that does usually happen. meaning some ideas about selling e-books arnall formalized, different and it seems and particularly at the moment to have this particular discussion. tonight's discussion by the way being filmed by c-span book tv for later broadcast. we will have q&a afterwards. when we do you have to wait for the person with the microphone to get to use of the audience at home can hear your question. for those of you watching this at home, we are coming to you from the event space in the melville book shop located in the brooklyn neighborhood known

as dumbo down under the manhattan bridge overpass. our guests are two of the most grizzled -- i'm sorry [laughter] -- distinguished veterans of independent publishing and we are pleased to have them with us tonight. [laughter] richard nash is the former publisher of soft skull, where he helped launch the careers of lots of great counter cultural underground wild writers, matthew sharp, lynn tallman. richard has become also since then one of the country's leading speakers on issues of digital publishing, new concepts of copyright all of which he's putting into practice in a new company he's in the process of inventing called cursor. colin robinson, formerly head of verso, and then the new press after which he was an editor at scrivener's -- scribner. he published such books as

kristopher hitchens the trial of henry kissinger, matt taibbi spanking the donahey, my favorite title of collins is the first book after he went corporate and became an editor at scribner we all felt that colin and his first book there was fidel castro's autobiography. [laughter] now he is the co-founder of a new publishing house called or books started with another veteran of the publishing, john oakes. they've done one book so far, and was a best seller. it's called quote code going rouge, a spoof on sarah palin's book. welcome to both of you. let me start buy simply asking you to describe your new companies and new efforts. i will start with you, richard. >> okay. effectively the company is an effort to build a model that

reflects the writing, reading, relationship as icy it as opposed to as it has been served up until now. and the key realization i have about the way in which it is changed is that there was once a time called few writers many readers and there's now a time called many writers many readers and in the time of many writers many features, you had to use a sort of relatively new paradigm capitalist term. you have a shift from a single sided market place for, we're basically a finite number of products are dumped on a very large number of people to a multi cited market place where there's a whole chunk of people on either side and you sit in the middle and basically try to match make for them.

that's the cute way of describing it. harvard business review is that the way of describing it. and an example of a two sided marketplace is the market could say for adobe reader for pds where they guidry the reader that you read pdf on and they charge of the lawsuit for adobe acrobat which makes the pdf, currently summarized. and so in effect the people who are buying the expensive software are subsidizing the people who are given software. so, i sort of felt that just looking at the soft skull slash pile it was absolutely clear that the world where i somehow or another genius we picked books out of the slush pile was basically gone and that in part

because the people who were submitting those books, those manuscripts were buying all of my books. they are my most important customers. and how donner treat them? i sent them rejection slips. the people keeping us afloat were the people i treated most rudely. so at the core of what i am trying to do is recognize effectively that this sort to cited marketplace is a universe of a brazillian to cited marketplaces and they are beautifully represented by the ecosystem of american and indeed international independent publishing or we have writers and readers identify with press like melville, like verso and the new press, like soft skull and see themselves as a part of the community and wish to participate as deeply in that

community as possible. and we want to give them the opportunity to do that. that's sort of vague but we will keep talking and i will get more specific. >> thank you, verso colin. what exactly is or books? >> it is accompanied john oakes and i set up in the middle of last year. and we decided that we were just going to start from scratch. for the sort of books we wanted to publish which in my case i suppose it broadly political book although some cultural books as well in john's case i think the emphasis on what he does is probably more cultural but he's also interested in political publishing. the traditional model was no longer working and the reason it was no longer working was

because the retailers in publishing had such power and were taking so much money out of the process, taking such massive discounts to sell the books there was no money left to promote the books. and this was happening at a time the number of polk did the books being published as richard suggested was soaring. so it's not clear exactly how many books are being published in the united states but it's probably something like half a million new titles a year so that's what, 10,000 books a week. the amount of malaise that creates and the amount of confusion about what people should read means that if you don't promote a book then it

just gets lost in the morass, and so we felt that we really needed to find a model which would allow us to promote books, and the model we adopt it is one where we are not publishing three many books. second, we are going to solve them directly to the customer and we are going to either sell them as ebooks or print them on demand. we are not going to have a warehouse, so the cost of running a a warehouse distribution system is saved. we are not going to give discounts away because we are going to be selling directly to the customer and the money that we save in order for those areas we are going to spend on promotions so we are talking about spending 25, 50,000, $150,000 promoting a book that we publish which is an unprecedented amount of money for the sort of titles john and

i are interested in. so we began last fall with the publication dennis mentioned of this book, "going rouge." we had to do it pretty quickly because the idea came from a agent who had seen the announcement of sarah palin's book, "going rogue pecos we only had about a month to put the bush out but publishing direct we can avoid the incredibly long -- we can avoid the incredibly long delay of the conventional distribution system. as we put the book out in about a month. we published it on the same day

as sarah palin's book and we got a fantastic response. we sold about 6,000 copies of our site and direct customers publication. >> about 6,000? >> about 6,000, and we got some interest in the papers and sold the book to a company called hc holly who then about a month of our publication put it out into the tree of the conventional book and that is very much part of the model of we hope that we can adopt which is one of getting by spending this promotion and making this big effort in terms of publicizing the book get some malays coming around, get some attention to it and then put it out into the trade through rights deals so that it can be brought in a conventional way in bookstores. so it's obvious the incredible

early days we only have done one book but as dennis mentioned it did go under the extended list of "the new york times" bestsellers and so at the moment i feel we can cling to become a publishing company in the new york city and possibly the world which only publishes "new york times" bestsellers. [laughter] >> i meant to say that in your intro. just to clarify, are you also doing the print version of books or is that not in the plan? >> it's very much in the plan but we are printing them by the warehouse what we will do is announce the book, start spending some serious money promoting get nearly all digitally. it's all for running ads by mailing lists, video is really an important part of what we're doing trying to put together a really great short videos about the books that can be passed around a fire early and we will try to build as many orders as we can before we release the

book. we will print that number. you don't have to print -- people think print on demand a sprinting one copy at a time. that is not how we are doing it. if we can build 3,004,000, 5,000 orders will bring that number obviously. >> the first edition is going to be an ebook? >> no, we are announcing them simultaneously as e-book and be back or hardback and on this book "billing rouge" we announce both simultaneously thus be eight was considerably cheaper than the paperback. i would say that about 95% of the orders that we took were for the print edition. so i think also the ebook market is growing it is still a small part of the business as things stand now. >> gannet the print edition of this was done by who?

>> it's printed by the -- we printed it out of a company called bouck mobile -- >> but it's still your book. you didn't sell the license for that? >> no, we did. so we sold it as a paperback and as a ebook for about a month and then be licensed it to a conventional publisher, hci in florida. >> that can change future titles? you may or may not license out like that? >> yeah, obviously i don't think every book we published we are going to be able to sell to a big paperback. i think that hgi books sold more than 50,000 copies to the trade. not every book is going to work at that sort of level. but i think more than average it will work at that level because we are spending so much money

promoting it. >> also in this particular but you benefited from lots of people not knowing how to spell. [laughter] particularly at fox news i know there were many instances they were doing stories about sarah palin's book but some of a gun is that colin's book by stephen using in the background? yes indeed it was. [laughter] estimate there were a number of things we were very fortunate of. one is it was a really happenstance, but the words " going rouge" and sarah palin had five letters so it was easy because of her book it said sarah palin here and "going rogue" here. it was easy to change that around. but then we did get this design that we came up with which is very closely replicates sarah

palin's own cover exit rather than having a sunny sky with light puffy clouds in the background we've put a founder sky -- founder scott and balk of lightning. it's supposed to evoke the kind of stephanie miller approach to sarah palin. and the third thing burleigh and editors at the nation who were able to put to put together very quickly and produce something which is a serious and exciting read so that when the book went out there was a lot of word of mouth this was a book that was really worth reading. >> with a beginning to company. >> which is have to keep up the next ten years and we can probably afford to pay some

stuff in random office. >> tell me about that. what is the staff and office situation like? >> it is absolutely nonexistent at the moment. [laughter] spec working at home in your jammies? >> pants are definitely something i now wherefore going out. [laughter] >> i'm glad we could clarify. >> but no -- >> you have a partner, john oakes, another great new york publisher. you share an office, are you working at home? >> of the daytime office for or books is the cafe on 21st and seventh avenue and the evening office is the bar next to the chelsea hotel. [laughter] on bad days we tend to go to the evening office earlier than on good days. [laughter] estimate you are actually working independently of each other? >> well, it's not -- it's not

easy to communicate by e-mail and phone, and in fact my experience working inside simon and schuster when i was at scribner was there was actually very little physical interaction between people in a company that there were a thousand people in the office. but people didn't see each other. they sat in their offices and they e-mail each other. >> that was your typical publishing situation then? >> no, it was very unusual for me. i never worked in a corporation like that before and was an eye opener. the kind of flak of esprit de corps was surprising to me. i would have thought to run a company effectively you would want to try to get people to work together but i think these large corporations don't really want that.

they want people to get on with their jobs. >> one thing i want to ask you about is exactly that. esprit de corps,, artery of an office of books being made in a partnership i know here in melville house, very small operation of five people, but as the group working together, not just the editorial author relationship, but the relationship with the book designer and the artists and all of the editorial production, publicists, the marketing and all becomes the feeling of a team, it becomes an integral part of making the book. are there aspects of that that are going to be replicated in the more virtual companies of the future? your company is for the simple? >> you want to take it, richard? >> in my case come effectively the community is the company.

so, the company may have 5,000 people working on most all of whom are on course of pay and many are on some level paying themselves into the company in some way, shape or form by buying things or subscriptions. but one of the court dimensions is to build a platform that allows that to develop organically but also a efficiently and to allow people to upload works in progress to allow people to create groups as sort of in this post mfa principal of what the hell do you do next. well, if you got three or four friends whose opinions you trust and you are in different countries, our platform is designed or states or cities,

our platform is designed to allow you to be able to collaborate with your peers and when you feel it's right allow it to be visible to the entire group and in the antiyour peer group comments on it. and so that may be -- one of the interesting things i found since leaving soft skull, i get approached frequently by riders who asked me how to get published, the classic question publishers get from reuters how do i get published. and i answer by things like think about excerpts, short fiction, writing essays, think about reading writers blog is coming to writers web sites commenting on it, going to the reading series, go to the east and series at melville house, become part of your community. and i say, you know, you can instrumental lies all of that activity of a community meeting

in dorcy publishers and agents are going to find out about me. but the thing i sort of feel deeper down is it is going to make you happier any way. because i published a lot of writers, maybe 150 of whom have never been published before, and i know for certain that the simple fact of editing, designing, printing, shipping and shelving a book does not make reuters happy in and of itself. that's the ominous roar of writers not being happy. [laughter] so, it's about connecting. it's about connecting to a group of peers dee dee writers ward readers or shares or hybrid of all that, you know, one of the sood board to become beautiful things of the post industrial revolution internet is that we don't have as ruthless decide

between the producer and consumer any more. that is one of the things marks was getting out with alienation. if you can exist as more than just a consumer of books other people have written, then that is a deeper way of existing which is not to sort of diminished the active editing, designing, printing, shelving and shipping, shipping and shelving, and then on unfortunately most frequently shipping again. [laughter] on shelving, shipping, packing in boxing. definitely not making authors happy. so, what we are focused on doing is basically devising an environment where a certain amount of happiness can be

created, conventional publication and then also do conventional publication, because i think if you just do the one in this day and age if you don't put scan in the game i don't think you are fully serving the community. if you want to create a community you have to go out and bang the drum for the community. one of the things i felt was important that soft skull, the closest i came to be able to describe what we did was to say we bring the alternative to the mainstream which is to say by seduction or might prove to force -- brute force will try to shove down the throats the stuff we were publishing and if you're doing that on behalf of your community and your community is not going to congregate around you. they will find somebody that will house all for them. >> this may be the same question for both of you, but what is the new marketing scheme for a new company like this? we have alternatives now to

having shove things down the throats of the mainstream media. [laughter] we have -- you mentioned making videos and trying to go final with videos. there's all kind of new publications and blobs and websites that are getting powerful for helping us talk about books. colin, why don't you tell us what -- you hinted that the life of video. what is that new kind of marketing going to be? >> i think it's the first from book to book. we've got robert greenwald to make a movie for this book. he does a lot of stuff which is popular on youtube critiquing fox news, so he seemed like a good person to choose to have a go at sarah palin. they did a -- his company is called brave new films. they did a very effective three

minute film cutting together bits of sarah palin opining in the way that she does. and, you know, it was -- i think it was in the spirit really of a kind of jujitsu publishing. we were using the strength of our opponent against themselves, and that went very well on this book. partly because of the confusion around the title and partly because i think there were a lot of people in the united states who felt that, you know, buying a copy of "boeing rouge" rather than "going rogue" was a political act. we got people talking about the book but the discussion was also it went very wide, we were on entertainment tonight with the book, keith olberman, fox news, entertainment weekly. i mean, it really went all over the place but it was quite

shallow, the discussion, as you would expect in other arenas like that. the next book we are doing which is a book by a writer named norman finkelstein who's got a substantial reputation for writing controversial books on the israel palestine conflict and wrote a book which came out that i published that verso a few years back called quote polk holocaust industry," which really i think change people's perception of the way the holocaust was being remembered in the united states. ..

as a result of the way of what happened in gaza was reported by amnesty international launched in the goldston report by the united nations. now the book were going to turmeric in a different way. [inaudible] >> well, norman has been are your times before. a holocaust industry was reviewed in "the new york times." although i remember the day it came out, norman said that he checked back into the archives of "the new york times" to see how they had reviewed it when i

came out of there some satisfaction that they reviewed considerably kind to them, their review of the holocaust. so they do cover him. in infectors in "the new york times" last week as a movie just came out about him called a documentary called american radical and they ran a big piece in the up section. i think it will be in "the new york times." it's not beyond entertainment tonight. i could be wrong, i turn -- >> it has to be one for the mainstream. >> so we made a video, asper taylor, who is a very good documentary filmmaker made the examined life to really take documentary, made a documentary with norman talking about the book. if we had to cut footage for more than just him sitting there, we cut footage of hawser into it and put that on our side

entre site and on youtube. if they're not up for even a couple weeks. you think maybe a thousand or 9000 people have looked at it so far. were getting lots of lots of organizations to mail out details of the book, returned to make everything we send out is really well written and really well-designed and really compelling. and there's probably a couple hundred thousand people around the world to know norman's work and are interested in it and want to get to every one of those and i think we can by going to the organization, the sort of communities that richard was talked about. and putting in the case further than go into the w. w. w. or books.com. >> say that again. last night >> i was www.orrville.com.

>> how do you get cursor in its publications to some people? >> well, the thing is that actually the community perceived at least the printed product in that. i mean, we've probably already gone about 1500 people find out today, the fierce community is called red lemonade, which will have sort of an ascetic and subcultural vibe -- [inaudible] >> the cursor is the name of what will be a portfolio of imprints. you know, we aim to have quite a few different communities, each sharing the same infrastructure

in terms of conventional distribution and also -- i mean there's two other dimensions in addition to kind of the community itself. i will actually answer the question and it's centered around the community. but to give you a sense of what it is that they are selling beyond membership in the community itself and beyond the mets six, eight, 12 months later will be published to the conventional supply chain. we'll also be doing limited editions and will also be having online. effectively, to use another capitalist term, my feeling is that the book of wishing business has not been capturing all the value under the demand curve. so, demand curve is a prime example of one person will pay ten grand for one day and 10,000 people will pay 1 dollar for it

and then there's a diagonal line that joins the top and the bottom of that. publishing has just been focused on the $15 to $25 bid and ignoring all the rest of it. but america's mfa programs have been happily extracting $25,000 a year at the top of the demand curve and if america's fashion industry has been busily grabbing projects that allegedly told stories about ourselves, the genes that tell stories about us, the lampshade, the chair that tells narratives about who you are as a person. yet, for a publishing narrative where publishing actual stories as opposed to chairs masquerading as stories. so there are people out there who will actually -- you have the disposable income who given the opportunity to do it through the medium of a book rather than the medium of a means chair knocked off while i believe do

it as a lot of people down at the bottom of the demand curve who will happily pay 99 cents for the download of something that dumb blogger they know has absolutely about, but they do not have the time to begin to read the first chapter. but an impulse buy at 99 cents looks pretty good and your marginal cost of reproduction is zero. so we're trying to get people -- so we're trying to find revenue, trying to find money for the author all the way up and down because other less nice people are doing it already in the money isn't in the author's hand. so effectively if the community. it's the old street team model for me, early 90's indie record labels. you actually listen to your community a much and give you of

covers and they like it when you actually pay attention and they'll tell people there's this great book. they picked the cover of light. they picked it, they thanked me and all of a sudden 20 of that person's friends are out there yapping about the boat. so fundamentally, marketing to me is procter & gamble have figured out you can. one of procter & gamble bleach brand has dumped all its tv advertising and put it all into social media. bleach. [laughter] ciré now on twitter the word book is used twice a second. people want to tell people about the books they like. procter & gamble are working to tell people about bleach daylight. so it's much more natural to just allow people to talk about stuff and help them talk about what they like and to embrace

and embrace what they have to say about what they like. and that really is sort of like, i know it's like that at melville house and sort of you for calling, we would've never existed without our interns. 250 interns during my time easily, 350 may be. that was people who were giving you hundreds of hours of their lives to help you do these kinds of books, to help this community survive in the sort of working capital retail environment. and so, it's not anything we aren't already doing. i'm just being a little bit more self-conscious about it i guess. >> well, we hinted at several things in the book industry that i would say are pretty much

broken, hinting at returns, talking about the difficulty of media, of independent publishing in particular, getting into the media. what are the specific things, you know, in the wild ones they ask marlon brando what he's rebelling against any sense what he thought? [laughter] tonight you can say that. i'm going to ask you what exact are you rebelling against? what are you trying to fix with your company is exactly? what are the key issues you think you need to fix? tom. >> well, it all looks weird. we're going to publish books which are generally quite radical and i think it's

important not to lose sight of the fact that really, you know, you can come out with all sorts of ideas about how you publish, but really what makes a the publishing company work or not is really what you publish it, and i tell you publish it. or least if you don't get where you publish right, it doesn't really matter how you get into that release. so i think the first thing that we're railing against with a lot of books that will be publishing is this stinking consumer capitalist culture that we're all having to deal with, which i think is really destroying people's lives on a scale which is just terrible and it's destroying people's lives in publishing like it is everywhere else. i think it's individually being people. it's breaking up any kind of

social structures so that people are operating alone and that's very frightening for people. and i think -- i mean, it's more wider discussion never let to go into here, i don't know. but i think the reason that actually it's getting harder and harder to read and easier and easier to write is a sort of expression of that isolation, the consumer capitalism in turn capitalism. they are trying to assert their existence in a society where all the normal structures that you have getting feedback about what you think and who you are falling apart. so we're definitely in terms of the politics of what we're going to publish, whether they're directly political books or only

going to do fiction and short stories and books on culture. i think that's going to be a true list as a radical dissension from that kind of dominance organizing forth of contempt for consumerism capitalism. and we are going to publish in a radically new way. we are going to start off by putting a serious amount of resources and money into getting people to know about our books. that's i think something, you know, both in the pendants that i was working for and in simon & schuster. they were simply no resources to that. it wasn't the model. the model was that you put it out there, you spend all the money putting it up there and if the word, you know, you might

put some resources behind it to make it work at her. but actually that is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. if you don't make an effort, you don't commit any resources, then it won't work. and so what happened or that the books came back and everyone felt the failure. the publisher felt the failure. i mean, return rate in the united states for new books are running at about 40% good and mean, it's. the whole country is covered by books that are being delivered and then sent away. it's a terrible system, terrible environment chile, terrible for everyone in the system. we put out a press release saying we thought we'd reached the point of no return. [laughter] i think we have. so if people want to return our

books, they're going to have a very hard time doing so. they can't can send them to my apartment. >> so you actually signed non-return. yes, we are the selling director people who say they want the book and pay for it. i mean, readers. so yeah, we can't take any returns. so that's one thing we're rebelling against. terms of the actual books, i think, you know, in that respect were actually quite conventional. i think we are committed to good writing, clear writing, mutual writing. we want to edit the books carefully and design them usefully. it's not the question of thinking of new forms of writing or i think in that respect were quite conventional. but in terms of the idea we're publishing and the way we're publishing, you know, we're definitely in ever belly of

street mall books. >> to the key rebellion seem to be across the concept of big publishers becoming more in the entertainment business, whether it's not putting out a product that can be useful socially and their mechanisms for doing so are falling away. am i reading you correctly? that seems to be the key motivator here beyond fixing individual things like the returns idea. >> yeah, i think the capitalist space for distributing ideas. there isn't really one available. you know, i'm not convinced enough that public processing is very popular either. marketing is a term for distributing because it's basically -- well first of all, it means that it tries to force the people who are running publishing companies into operating in a way which is entirely unethical.

i mean, only responsibility is to make another bigger profit for their shareholders. i mean, if you're a year, you're not just expected to make as much money as you possibly can with the hospital you're working in. your responsibility to the patients. and if you're a lawyer, at least if you're a good lawyer, you should have some commitment to the idea of justice and not just making a lot of money for your law firm. but if you're running a publishing company, that's not a consideration. the consideration is only that you make a large corporation that owns u.s. much money as he possibly can and you make more for them every year. and that makes the publish -- and mean, it's a very, very, you can see what's happening in publishing. big oaks are ever more important and so defend bigger and bigger advances on a few titles that they hope are going to be heads and the rest just turns around

and the way that i was talking about, with no effort being put into the publication of the book are marketing the books at all. it's really a terrible system. >> an emphasis on, marketing maybe isn't the right word, but ways to get people to talk about your work. >> i think, you know, i pretty much agree with richard's idea of finding communities that are going to be interested in the books to get them going. and i have some of showing the jacket to 400 people is something which i personally find terrifying. [laughter] richard said, one person is going to say great. the other 399 are going to say you made a terrible mistake. >> the interesting thing they

are is my experience, it was even true with sales rose to my experience is that gracious listening counts more than the decision-making. i mean, i guess in terms of what i'm sort of trying to rebel against, i guess i'm going to sort of not radically, but sort of gently dissent from the idea that people are writing more purely out of a kind of social isolation. i do believe people are writing to be around. that's what i've seen from the people who have sent me their writing is they want to be read. the history of the world has really been a history of improving our capacity to get to disseminate ideas.

and that every time new technologies arrive, it makes it easier, the people who are in charge of the previous system for disseminating ideas announced that culture is now over. it began way back with socrates and plato, who enjoyed the notion of books because it meant people were going to memorize information any more. books are going to destroy society. and continue through the gutenberg revolution were books would allow the bible to be translated wrongfully. into the 19th century were printing would allow women to read novels, which would result in them coming loose and comics in the 1950's, the invention of relatively cheap for cover printing were going to destroy american society. and then we of the internet that's now going to destroy american society.

it's again and again and again. it's sort of a relentless little watching people object to the democratization of the dissemination of knowledge. so i sort of feel quite -- i mean, i share many of your concerns about the broader picture, colin, but i think at the level of what is motivating people to write more, i'm sort of powerfully optimistic about it because mostly when the elites who are the only people who could write and read, they were about sharing. they were little medieval japanese people sharing stories amongst themselves. and not the social media has to do is to share work that we love and tell people about why we buy that. and that, to my mind, has been allowing a sort of tremendous

efflorescence of the capacity to share and disseminate opinion, idea, culture. and the academic field, the idea of open access has been spectacular. i mean, it's not going to necessarily great for university presses, but is tremendous for the process of peer review and saving libraries. so i mean, i guess in a certain way i'm rebelling against pessimism. i'm rebelling against the pessimism of the broken supply chain because i think what lives in front of us is this imminent massive democratization of capacity to tell stories and to argue about what those stories mean. and so, it feels kind of

gloriously around the corner. but you have to have that type of middaugh dies an independent publisher because always there's a sense it is going to be great next season. [laughter] >> what's one thing i can take from both of you that there is a bigger optimism now. i think we see suddenly things happening, suddenly working, alternative forms of media, wasted by returns and discounting? in fact, let me go with that. i just a couple more questions before we turn it over to the audience. i'm wondering. read a hell of the battle in the book business for the last weekend before mcmillan, one of the big six publishers went to amazon and said we're not going to do it your way anymore. amazon had been tracing a lot of bestsellers at $9.99 or less. not all, in fact there's quite a

few books being sold for more than not. but that try point was becoming a problem for big publishers and finally one stood up and said we're going to go with a different model. not a different model was that much more expensive and that more money for amazon but it also meant amazon was going to lose control of the market. and so a real battle ensued, but it didn't really break. amazon pulled all mcmillan spoke spermicides which is an amazing thing to do. a selling books, hundreds of titles, tours, sci-fi publishers, all kinds of great publishing houses that are from the leader retailer in the business. and we're going to look into a few other publishers, harpercollins and simon & schuster joined in and said that we're going to go the same way with mcmillan and amazon had to

capitulate. so a new way of pricing was born called the agency model. and i'm wondering, you know, this seemed to be a shift from the giant retailer setting pricing back to publishers having something to say about the price of their product. i'm wondering how this bears on what you guys do? >> i mean, i think my reading of amazon's capitulation is slightly different of yours and not i think they capitulated to their customers, not to the brandishing of we're going to go the same way that came from the corporate publishers. the customer said, let us decide whether or not to buy the overpriced books that mcmillan -- if mcmillan wants to set the prices at $15, let them. we just won't buy them, but give us the choice. don't pull the books, let us decide whether or not we are going to pay what we think is too much money for the books.

i viewed it as -- >> is a good book from amazon that seemed a little vintage did to me. >> it was totally dumb and stupid of amazon to do that. but with the people they listen to to correct the mistake for the customers. and so i think the alternate outcome of this is that publishers are going to learn that the prices they want are not going to sell at those prices. >> you know, i mean the mass market. i'm going to go on the record on c-span on saying that there is one of these betting markets. i think there's a website industry standard. the standard that they have betting market of who will win, you know, the election and someone is trying to persuade them bring out to do a market on e-book prices december 31, 2010.

and i'm going to put in something more along the lines of eight i think will be the number. because i think that's what people want. i think that's where readers are entitled to. i don't think we should have to pay for huge amounts of midtown office space. and that's what they're saying we should be paying for. >> tom, what was your take on this? >> well, we don't filter in the sun. we don't sell through the major retailers. i mean, when we publish "going rogue" we said we have writers to publish the book and we were very polite and our response, but we said we didn't want to sell it and we wanted to sell direct because we needed the discount that they would

otherwise take to promote the book. i mean, my feeling is on a $20 book you would be giving barnes & noble or amazon probably, if you agreed the promotion money, maybe 12 or $13. my assessment is that we can find the audience for books more effectively if we have $12 or $13 per book in barnes & noble or borders can or amazon can't tell which is not to say, i don't want to come out just bashing these companies because, you know, i'm love going to barnes & noble as much as anyone else. i bought books at amazon. i use them all the time. i think the sort of books that i publish is really the system doesn't really work. i'm not sure about the price.

i'm entitled to think that books are often enterprise. and i think the relationship between price and perceived value -- [inaudible] the receipt party doesn't necessarily get it. a lot of the business that was done last fall in the american book trade was on sarah palin's boat which was selling at $27.300 something page hardback with sections of the middle. you could argue the writing itself is worthless, but the actual object itself is a very substantial book and it was selling -- i think it was selling on amazon for $9.95. there are places in new york -- you know, i think --

>> you get to keep it and look at it again. the nike know, a book is something which if it's done properly, if it's done well, is something that you can't -- you know it's going to take you many hours to read. it can change your life. you can read it over and over, you can give it to a friend. it's something that's very important about a book. i mean, you can buy a t-shirt for eight box. so i sort of thing -- i'm not convinced that the issue here is the book prices are too high. ..

el observing it. it's 20 hours given over to another person's voice inside your head. the amount of time it takes to sample that to read the first chapter is an hour in which time you could have listened to 18 songs, watched two sitcoms and have a movie many of which could be priced lower. so i think you're absolutely right that from a standpoint if we can create a physical object

commensurate with something that you would keep, something has to go back to earlier examples a chair that you can give to your children, heirlooms, cutlery of a certain sort, painting of a certain sort, then you can justify a very significant amounts of money. but on a digital download, which actually can't be shared for the most part due to digital rights management which doesn't benefit from the first sale doctrine in relation to copyright law in other words you can't resell it used, the value is. but there is immense opportunity because you can start to deal with the sampling problem. if you're only paying 99 cents to potentially sample something,

and you're going to be much more open to the possibility of acquiring debt and falling in love with that writer and taking glasses and spending hundreds to spend time with that writer or have dinner with that writer so there's all kind of ways once you've solved the sampling problems and have been able to introduce people to mike mifsud riding through very cheap digital prices did you can start i think to really start to create beautiful objects. my time could have been called 55, 5045 which is the reduction in the poundage of paper we were typically printing on to read when i started in 2001 we were printing and 55 culpepper, 2004 was going at 50 lb and by the time i left soft skull last year we were doing too many books on

50,000--- 55 count. because it's cheaper. frankly it could be argued pbs or better than the crap i was printing when i left soft skull because at least it wouldn't turn yellow. so i would love to introduce gorgeous made books. i would love to have been doing what black sparrow used to do when they published on paper eckert cover 100 copies of the limited edition. i love the books. i would loved books to the things we can justify cutting down all those trees because the book is going to be a multi generational artefact -- artifacts. i don't see much of the books the industry doing is actually warranting that kind of love and

affection. i think it's memory. i think we are interpreting a lot. so i just mean digital to see the prices low. i would love to see prices go up on the print artifact. >> well, i've still got a lot of questions for you. we haven't even gotten to the questions of copyright and how publishers will be managing that in the future but i think it's time to take questions from the audience. first i want to thank both of you. i've spent many sessions with both of you butting our heads against these issues we felt were defeating like pricing in the media and returns and the nuts and bolts of publishers and it's exciting to think that maybe we are actually at a time we can wrestle those things to the ground and you both are living examples of the fact that this is a very exciting moment in the history of making books. so why think you for coming tonight and now if there are any

questions from the audience we just need to get a microphone in front of you. anyone? are there any answers from the audience? [laughter] yes, tom. sprick i just want to know if you see your emissions expanding the public or getting their attention away from the books you think they shouldn't be reading? >> nice question. [laughter] >> trick question. >> i don't know the answer myself. >> i think it is a brilliant thing to get people where you and them are on the level of the same thing and to be in the position of telling them they

are wrong, telling them they are ignorant or i prefer the first. it might have to do a bit of the latter. >> -- going after new readers were trying to get the? >> are a sort of feel you focus on going where the glove is. [laughter] >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> show me the glove and i will follow it. >> i.t. we are publishing for both, publishing for we would like people to read the sort of books we are doing rather than a lot of the draft coming out from mainstream publishing but we'll also would like to win over new

audiences. that raises a question that maybe there is a disagreement between richard and i on this relationship between reading and writing and i do think it's getting harder and harder to read and easier easier to write and that is a problem. let me argue the case first of that technology has made it much easier for you to actually put words out you can put things out electronically, you can look things up much more easily, you can certainly distribute what he would write much more easily with this new technology, the new conventional publishing, the old way of publishing yet when it comes to reading i'm not

convinced yet that the devices that have come out, the electronic readers that make reading easier than reading a book. in effect to the extent i've tried them media is just my age but they seem to be not satisfactory to the the the main thing that makes reading more difficult is there's so much available to read and i think it puts people off of reading. i think if you offer people a choice of you know, 100 things is a choice. if you offer them a choice of half a million it's not a choice at all it's just confusion and malaise the cannolis and makes people shy away from the unusual. it makes them more conservative rather than more at interest and it may make him move away from reading altogether. and i do think -- it's not the people who are writing don't

want to be read, they do want to be read the there is a lack of recognition that actually not everyone can write, not everyone is entitled to an audience. writing well is a hard thing to do and the level and of the playing field seems to be a problem in that sense because it is increasingly hard to get to the good words, the welford in words because of this morass of bad lee written words. that's why and you are probably going to think this is the elitist compared with your kind of group sourcing model but i think that it's really important for people who are effective editors and cable of sorting through this morass of stuff whose reputations are established and people have a good body come to the floor and say we notoi we do

publishes going to be something that you're going to be interested in and we are going to edit it and designer it well and find ways of telling you about that so that you don't have to come from this huge flood of stuff. we are going to help to make a selection and it's encouraging to me and that is where my hope for independent publishing comes is i think those roles -- the role of the warehouse man and sales representative and sales clerk in the bookstore, those jobs are drawing up the role of the editor is capable of making a meaningful recommendation for the book and the role of the publicist capable of battling against the background noise and bringing the book to people's attentions those jobs are going to be ever more important.

>> there is a bunch of really good stuff in there and it's sort of a chunk of it that i'm totally copacetic with. i.t. to underestimate the extent to which what i'm describing already exists and is how we do our job. "going rouge" benefits from the multiple records to work to the nation magazine and multiple editors. in an environment of quite a number of people per dissipating -- participating in ever greater ways and the subscriber base of "the nation" is what helped create this book. when i used to get queried for agents or writers directly all of the substance, the description of where they published, with readings they

read, who their friends were, that is outlining a community. it is referred to to kroger's sourcing to give somebody something that seems knew were but we have been crowd sourcing for centuries which we do. we are tribal. we listen to our community and that's -- editors are not isolated people. they are working on the shoulders of an entire environment culture i servant to. it's my job to be a conduit for soft skull, not to decide in some other way what was soft skull, and that is a professional role i was deputized to do by the community and they would either fly year me or vanish if i were doing a bad job of channeling the book

the community wanted me to be publishing and supporting so in a certain sense we've got a distinction if maybe a little bit more semantic than it looks in the first blush the process of charging, faltering, ascertaining and waiting opinion is something that we've always already been doing and we have these digital tools that help us do it on a slightly broader scale than we used to be able to the existing supply chain system, you saw how many copies of sarah palin sold. it's not doing a very good job reading of the books at all. it's shoving enormous quantities of crack the books and to the kosko. i feel like if it were true of the more books that were created the harder it would be to find the interesting stuff than soft

scope -- soft skull would never have existed because we forget there is an original prior digital revolution that started basically in the 80's and early 90's and could be told to be called the desktop publishing revolution, and it was the transformation of the dissemination of information wrong to buy xerox, kinkos, adobe page maker, quirk in design, photoshop without which soft skull could not have come into existence. >> soft skull actually started [inaudible] >> it started in kinkos on 12th street and 1993. a perfect example and was a shared culture, sharing ek $2 expect, a kind of social media an audience of a couple hundred

people for most. for alisa carver. so we've already had one revolution on this creation side and supply-side that would allow enormous number of books important published by independent publishers that would have never existed or never have been read. so i do think we have to -- we can't be complacent and i know there is a danger with all the sort of space stuff to get complacent about how we engage in faltering and you're absolutely right we do have to continue to help match the right books with the right readers and the power and value of doing that is a wonderful level of value that independent

publishers have always and always will be infinitely better accomplishing because we are better to the ground closer to the readers and writers. >> another question. yes. wait for the microphone a second. right over here. thank you. >> my question is for colin. i'm kind of intrigued by this business of selling direct to the customer and i guess you're describing a kind of online bookstores and then you sell the ebook or do print on demand. i have two questions one is quite small. are there any concerns about quality and physical object with print on demand? and i also kind of speculating in thinking do you see any possibility of cooperative publisher run online bookstore where maybe a couple of people who are thinking along the same lines as you might get together

to help each other get the books to the customer's? >> we are using a company in minnesota and it's really exceptional quality. in the end you should get paid and if you want to put a very cheap paper -- i think is our intention to keep the production standards of the books quite high and i don't think that is any more difficult with digital printing than it is with conventional. we haven't had any trouble with the quality of the books so far. >> digital print has come a long way and increased very quickly. >> what they are doing now is again it's getting the wheat

from this idea of i think people think the digital printing is you get one order and print the book. it's actually they don't do that on the book mobile. what they're doing is looking at the rate of the orders. we are looking at the rate of the orders coming in and then they do back printing so we might be printing even after the initial print run where we are printing several thousand of the books to meet the orders that we've taken prior to publication even after that. if the orders are coming in at say 300 a week or printed in a batch of 300 so they can base these on the level of demand but you've got. as to the itea of cooperating with other publishers i think our intention is to try to set up a really effective digital marketing unit inside all books

and we are going to try to and when we get enough but won't be very long and we can get some stuff together. i think the first thing we are going to do is concentrate on pulling together people who are very good at revising digital promotion because it's very much what we are doing and i think what we are doing that in order to find the resources to be able to put together a really great team like that we may very well try to cooperate with other people. you know it's not the possibility that rather than just selling books to the mainstream publishers after we have done promotion and direct sales of them we can actually take books from the publishers,

take them for a couple of months, do what we are doing on them and allow them to put them out in the trade so it would be the other way around. but yes, i very much corporate with people that because we do need to get some kind of economy of scale. it's not wish to be cheap to the operation together. >> i will throw in this about digital publishing, too. is this going to be a lot faster? do books a lot quicker they can predict for you in a week which is different from what most publishers are used to aid that can be very useful. they've been getting the word out there faster. very useful. other questions. >> yes, back here. hold on for the microphone. back in the corner there.

>> with to the desktop publishing and things like that these days how important do you think it is to actually have a publishing house? >> who is the question for? >> everybody of -- up there. >> depending on your individual skills as an author the desktop publishing demand could be designing that you don't need a publisher, notwithstanding the tremendously brilliant director from melville house sitting here in the front. [laughter] you know, one of the ways in which i try to sort of think about what i have to do well is to say there is a reader who has

a certain amount of money we will save $10 there is a writer supposed to get the $10 from the reader and everybody who takes a slice of that on the way from the reader to the writer has to justify what they're doing with their slice. they have to justify on the basis of helping connect the to appropriately. so i actually believe there is tremendous scope for intermediaries between writers and readers to justify that. for some reasons colin described it quite well in terms of providing editorial services, providing promotional services, design services and what i like to call matchmaking services,

sort of writer reader relationship consummations sources. >> colin? >> yes, i think he did partially already answered that. i think that if you have a desktop publishing system you could put something out there. finding somebody to read it is going to be harder i think because there's that much competition for both peoples time. so i think the responsibility of the publisher is to basically use their reputation to say to people this is something that you're going to be interested in reading and that's different than what publishing used to be. publishing when distribution was the key to what publishing was about, publishers put up the

capitol to put them in the warehouse. that is what publishers did. that is when to cease to be true in the future and what publishers are going to do is to say this is and what you should read and we are going to put a lot of resources behind to explain to you why you should read. it is a different function but it did hit equally -- it is an equally important one. >> the last question yes, right here. >> richard, you mentioned kind in passing the notion of premium participatory services, paying for a class or having dinner with an author and media is tested with the last question but i wonder if you thought that that was a role for the publisher or if he would be involved so how with more

liberal matchmaking between -- islamic i think the answer is going to be yes from most publishers to survive more than another four or five years. we are in the writer and reader connecting business. we have typically done side by printing things and allowing readers to find them on shelves. bye look at the world of writers and readers and see a desire for all kind of other connectivity and que can split those things out and have one company that does nothing but dinner and that may work but another thing that will work is to identify a group of writers and readers based on

culture, subculture beliefs and create an environment where you offer many ways of connecting may be just temperamentally that is an area i personally would like to focus on. one of the best things ever said about soft skull was set in the garden where the question that had was what books about you lead and, under said anything by soft skull. and i said in that moment i should have basically quit because that was the peak. i know that sounds torture a protest with recognizing the book as a proxy of identity and represents something deep and life changing as colin suggested

about you and that your capacity to connect to another person in a cultural artifact is at its most powerful with the book there for why not have jim harrison and novels published in the american right to be recommending why to go along with his books and use the wine wholesaler he writes the newsletter for in berkeley to supply line and books. people like drinking a glass of wine with a book so why not allow that to happen? i just realized i didn't give my url. colin got it in a very early www.thinkcursor.com, like the blanking. >> here at melville house we are

ahead of you because we have alcohol in the building. so we are going to invite you if you have final questions we are going to stop for melody and get a glass of wine and you can ask your questions directly to the gues. thank you very much for coming tonight. we appreciate your attendance. [applause] >> the melville house bookstore in brooklyn new york posted a see fit. for more information, visit mhpbooks.com. moly caldwell crosby writer for usa today "newsweek" and health magazine presents the history of an illness known as sleeping sickness which claimed millions of lives during the early 20th century. davis kid bookseller's of memphis tennessee hosts this half hour event.