attention to politics and help us make change. it is absolutely desperate and i'm out of time and i thank you all very much. [applause] >> thank you for coming. i want to remind you that doctor zogby will be signing in the autographing area to my left into your right. thank you again for coming to the festival. festival. please fill in the survey to be eligible to win a the reader and the caller. we will continue with the panel discussion on the hook industry in a minute. thank you. ..

here i have discovered the truth. >> to be the truth. >> well, it says -- yeah. [laughter] but the love of truth is the spirit of man. given where i was and for how long i was there, this is incredible, i have no business at all being here now. >> that is absolutely correct. >> now, you say that you were in jail 40-something years. what do you mean by that? >> well, i was in jail 47 years.

the fact that we are born into a prison, actually, when we're born, we're born as perfect beings. perfect means complete with all of our possibilities intact. but we're also born into a world of sleeping people, the level of unconscious human insanity where hate and wars and death and destruction and inequality reign supreme. so we are actually born into a prison. so i was in the, i was in that prison for the first 40 years of my life until i was able to wake up and get out of that prison. and realize who i really am. >> well, let's come to who you really are in a second, but let's just for the viewers' sake say that you were actually incarcerated in prison for about 20 years, 1964 or 5? >> 1966. >> '66. >> to 1985.

>> '66-'85. >> that's correct. >> and the charge was having murdered three people and wounded one in a bar. >> yes. it's just not having murdered somebody. i mean, to be accused of murder is bad enough. but to be accused of being a triple racist murderer is doubly bad. and that's what i was accused of being, a triple racist murderer. >> racist, why racist? >> because they were all white people who were killed. >> and was the charge that you had somehow targeted them because of their race? is. >> because of their race. because a black bartender had been killed by white man in another part of town that night. they thought that this was a racial revenge motive. but you also have to realize those times, at that time -- 1966 -- these were early '60s when the country was still selling redated, you know, when -- segregated, when black folks weren't allowed to eat in

restaurants or go to school or ride on certain parts of buses or drink out of the water fountain or even have equal voting rights at the time. >> uh-huh. >> that was what was going on in this country at that time, which was a terrible thing. and so that is what i was accused of, being a triple racist murderer. >> and in the book you write about growing up in a household that really was violent and difficult. facing your father across the living room with shotguns. >> yeah. my, my family life was not violent. the violence was outside the family life. but you got to realize that in may, this may i will be 74 years old. and so my mother and father come from a generation where they thought that if you, if a child put his hands on his parents or even threatened their parents, since they brought you into this world, they will take you out of this world as well.

that was the type of, of society that i grew up in. >> but describe for the people who are watching who might want to read the book why you would be facing your father with a shotgun, and he with a shotgun facing you. >> well, because i was a very angry young man. at the time. very angry. and i, i confronted my brother. my brother, james, who was a highly successful academic. i mean, he was going to harvard, he was one of the youngest to graduate from harvard university with a ph.d.. he later became the superintendent of schools of boston, you know? and i was in and out of reform or story schools doing -- reformatory schools during my youth. so my father had to sort of choose between which one he's gonna support. and i confronted my brother because when i came home from

the military in 1956, i heard that my brother was hanging out with homosexuals, you know? some that he had known when we were child, children growing up. now, when we were children, all of these folks used to dress up on halloween like women system and they looked better -- and they looked better than the women on the streets, you know? but now he was home on vacation from harvard university, and they were doing the same thing. so i confronted my brother on that. and we started to fight. and, of course, i beat him up. and that's when my father got involved in this. and my father jumped me because of that. and i pushed my father away and told him don't put his hands on me, i would allow no one to put his hands on me in anger anymore. so my father ran and got his shotgun, and i ran and got my shotgun. this is the same thing that

happened to marvin ghei and his father, and that's why -- >> killed him. >> killed him. you know? and if it hadn't been for my mother, my father would have killed me as well. >> because your mother intervened and said you should get out of here. >> get away. >> now, what's interesting here is you just described yourself as having technically been in jail for 20 years, '66-'85 -- >> uh-huh. >> -- but the violence and the whole world of hatred that you describe, you say that's been a jail for you for 40-plus years until you rediscovered yourself. let me read again from your book. you say you're going to be 74 years old. >> yes. >> you've been in jail. but you also write here, i was a prize fighter at one point, i was a soldier at one point, i was a convict, i was a jailhouse lawyer at one point. says here you were executive director of a group that was called association and defense of the wrongly convicted at one

point. today you're ceo of the innocence international group. >> yes. and it says but if i had to choose an epitaph to be carved on my tombstone -- remember, this is ruben hurricane carter speaking -- it would simply read he was just enough. >> just enough. >> now, this came because somebody in a high school audience asked you what you'd want for your epitaph. and, now, you're a man, bob dylan wrote a song about you. nelson mandela has quinn the forward -- has written the forward to this book, and i remember him talking to me about how he loves boxing. >> he was a boxer himself. >> and then he talks about someone like him who was in jail and has come out of it. so here's nelson mandela, bob dylan, even tony bennett, you say -- >> muhammad ali. >> muhammad ali. these people have all known you, and now it comes time for you to speak about yourself, and you

say for your epitaph you say it should he was just enough to stand up for his convictions no matter what problems his actions may have caused him, he was just enough to perform a miracle to wake up to escape the universal prison of sleep, to regain his humanity in living hell, he was just enough. just enough. >> just enough. >> so when people hear this, "just enough," i'm sure they're going to be thinking to themselves, well, just enough to get off, or just enough to escape or survive? why not to make something bolder? >> universeally we are all just enough. that's what that means. we are all universeally just enough. we are born with everything that we need to wake up and to become conscious. that is just enough. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we're here at the national press club's book and author

night talking with leslie dunton downer about her new book, "the english is coming." tell us what it's about. >> this week is about the globalization of the english language, and we're looking in this book at the words that have come into english from hundreds of different languages and gone out as english to all around the world. so the english that people are speaking all around the planet actually includes words that often come from languages that are their own native languages as well. and one interesting detail is that today english is spoken by people who don't use it as a native language at home so much for every native speaker of english, there are three nonnative speakers, and the number's likely to jump to six in a few years. so this is really a time when the english language is changing very quickly, and it's an exciting time to be a speaker of the language for people who speak it natively and not. >> and you focus on 30 pordz, i

understand? -- words, i understand? and how did you choose those words? >> i really wanted to pick words that came from different sectors of the language just to show the range of parts of life that english has entered into. so some of the words come from media like hollywood, like film and star. some come from cooking or just food like cookie which is also now a computer word. there's a lot of technology words because of the nature of the role of english and the technology sector. so blog, for example, and many others in that world. but also things just like business, the word business. you know, if you look at the language and see things ranging from activism, environmentalism, the economy, diplomacy, you can see that english -- if you pick a variety of words, you can see that english has entered into all of those. it's a very major language

that's used as a common language all around the world. >> thank you very much for your time. >> good afternoon and welcome to the second annual gaithersburg book festival. my name is gene taft, and i'm a member of the book festival organizing committee. gaithersburg is a city that proudly sponsors the arts and culture, and we are pleased to bring you this event free of charge. a couple of quick announcements, and we'll get started. please silence all your electronic devices that make any sort of noise. your feedback is crucial to helping us improve the event, so, please, fill out the survey after. you have a chance to win a nook color e-reader. we'd like to welcome our friends as c-span and the audience across the country. if you're going to ask a question, please, come and stand up at the microphone and speak loudly and clearly. i've been in the book business

for two decades, and over that time i've met a lot of wonderful, smart people, and i'm pleased to say five of them are assembled on the stage to discuss the often-frustrating industry that we love. next week in new york city people from all corners of the book industry will gather at bookexpo america, the annual book convention, to discuss every aspect of the industry. l i suspect many of the topics today will be discussed in new york next week, so, please, sit back as we offer you an exciting chance to see behind the curtain of the power to term what you'll be reading in the future. michael norris is a senior analyst at the book research firm simba information. without further ado, i'll turn things over to michael. enjoy the panel. >> thank you very much, gene. my name is michael norris, and i am a senior analyst from simba information, and with me today is mark laframboise of

politics & prose bookstore; jed lyons, head of the national book network; geoff shandler, the editor in if chief at little browne and company, and gail ross. before i do a truly good job introducing everyone, i just wanted to start off with a few words. i've been studying the publishing industry for about seven years now, and it's actually a pretty long time if you think of it about everything that's happened in just the past three and a half. but over the past seven years or so i've watched a lot of changes going on in terms of not just what is being said about the future of books, but also who's actually talking about it. because over the years a lot of newspapers have scaled back their coverage of books, and i can't think of a single paper off the top of my head that has scaled back their coverage of the tech industry or the

technology industry. so a lot of what we're seeing in just the day-to-day press east comes from the -- either comes from the view and the lens of a tech columnist, or it actually comes from the, um, marketing department of a multibillion dollar organization that really has a big financial stake in the future of books. it's actually very important to remember that if someone has a future that is completely and 100% tied up in e-books, they're going to tell you the state of the book is all about e-books. now, in order to try to separate the rhetoric from the reality, simba information along with our parent company, market research.com, we put together a national representative u.s. consumer survey, and we wanted to go to the entire u.s. adult population and basically ask, who's buying these things anyway? do you buy e-books? what devices on which do you read? how many books do you buy, and

so forth. and we've actually recently begun collecting this information quarterly for our e-book publishing 2011 report. we found that about 90% of the u.s. adult population hasn't bought a single solitary digital book, not a single e-book. and we also found out because we asked print book questions in these surveys that print book buyers still outnumber e-book buyers about 5-1. and the other thing we found out, and this is kind of interesting s that with everything that's been said about some of the new devices that are out there such as the ipad, we found about 40% of all ipad owners in the u.s. haven't read a single solitary e-book on the ipad. [laughter] so it's -- once you actually have a lot of independent and objective information about the book industry, you think you can talk about the state of the book. rather than doing that, i just want to talk about the state of one week. and this is a -- book, and this

is a book i bought about six weeks ago. i was at the london book fair, and i was walking across this massive exhibition hall, and i just saw something that made me stop dead in my tracks. it was a very large, black wall which was the side of a publisher's booth, and on the wall were these two-foot by three-foot photographs of really old and nice looking bicycles. and if you spend five minutes with me outside of books, you'll know i'm really into bicycles. i saw these signs, and i just thought to myself, wow, this is just an incredible book. it was an encyclopedia, i didn't know what kind of book it was, i just knew that i had to have it. and i made up my mind at that moment i was not going to leave london without this book. yes, i was able to get the book. i came in to the fair the next day, i was able to get it,. and this book is about this large, this thick.

it's a very, very heavy book, and i had to carry it around with me the whole rest of the day was i never made it back to my hotel. but i was really grateful to do that because the book was so gorgeous, i'm thinking about building a coffee table just to go with it. [laughter] now, we can -- so when we discuss the future of the book, we really can't build it on anything that steve jobs holds over his head at math world. at the end of the day you're not framing or creating content or telling a story to a device that's going to be declared obsolete in months. regardless of the format for the book or how it's distributed, it really has to -- selling one book at time to one person at a time and really making the book have so much value that somebody like myself did at the london book fair, will not care about any price barriers or content

barriers in order to get it. and we're always going to have print books forever. you can write that down, and i'll sign my name under it. we will have print books forever. but we're also going to be e-books forever, and the future of the book is going to involve all of us talking about where one stands in relation to the other. and how we can get innovative and intelligent people to really talk about ways to make the industry better. so with that, i'd like to introduce our first panelist. jed lyons, he is the president and ceo of roman and littlefield publishing group -- rowman and littlefield publishing group. they establish about 1200 new books annually under the imprints scare croix press, derry dale press, taylor trade and others. jed also serves as distributer of 200 independent publishers which rowman and littlefield

launched in 1976. he's a member of the chief executives organization, the counsel on foreign -- council on foreign relations and the chapter of the washington national cathedral. jed, welcome. >> thank you. well, i've often heard the book business referred to as the accidental profession, and when i first got into the business 36 years ago, i asked why, and the reason i heard was that there's really no way to prepare to be a publisher. you can't -- well, at least no those days you couldn't go and get a degree in publishing. you can, now, even get masters' degrees in publishing. but the accidental profession is how it's been known for a long time, so if you'll indulge me for a moment, i thought i'd tell you my accidental experience. so, like my guess is most of us in the book business, i was an

english major. but it started in high school with a fabulous teacher at a suburban high school outside of chicago called barrington high school where in the 1960s i was lucky enough to have a fantastic dead poets' type english teacher named charlie white. and in this gigantic public high school outside of chicago, charlie would show up every day wearing a tweed jacket, paisley ascot, long beard, long hair, and he was our hero. and he was everything we wanted to be. so he got us interested in reading and writing. most of us had never had any interest in it at all. but we were very lucky to have a guy like him inspire us. so after high school i, literally the day after i graduated, i hitchhiked around the country to visit all of my

favorite authors' haunts. i started off at concord, massachusetts, at walden pond. i spent a week dodging all the park rangers because i didn't realize walden pond was now a public park, but i spent a week trying to commune with henry david thoreau. then i hitchhiked down to new london, connecticut, and i found the bar where eugene o'neill wrote "the iceman cometh." from there i went down to see thomas wolf's haunts, "look homeward angel." then out to new mexico because i was a big d.h. lawrence fan at the time and actually met d.h. lawrence's widow. he had married, late in be life he'd married a much younger woman, and she was still live anything taos. so by now you can imagine i've got a full head of steam after a summer of visiting all these

famous authors' homes. and finally wound up in san francisco checking out where all of the beat poets and larry farangetti. so now i'm off to college, going to bowden college up in maine. and, of course, i'm going to be an english major. and i was lucky enough to have some great teachers there, too, who would teach herman melville, and we'd go out to the home of the professor which was situated on the rock overlooking the atlantic. and he would talk about ahab and the whale. it was all very real to me. so after college more hitchhiking, and now i'm trying to become the great american novelist. and i'm not making much headway. i'm having a good time, but i'm

finding it difficult to sit down and actually write something that's longer than a short story. so eventually i just had to come to the realization that i wasn't going to be the great american writer. maybe i would explore something else and, of course, publishing seemed like the next best thing. so 36 years ago we started our little company here in maryland. that was after i pounded on doors in new york city without success trying to find a job in publishing. that was in 19 -- late 1975. there were very few jobs available. anyway, i've never regretted the choice. publishing is a wonderful business. although today when i meet people for the first time and say i'm in the book publishing business, they kind of look at me like i have a terminal illness. are you okay? how are things going? you mean, year actually still

publishing books? yes, matter of fact, we are. we had our best year ever in 2010. but what has changed is that we are publishing many more books than we used to because we're selling many fewer copies of the books that we publish. and this is one of the phenomena that i'll talk about in a minute. it's hard to imagine that just ten years ago there were just 50,000 new books a year being published in the united states. five years ago it ratcheted up to 180,000 new books a year. that's one book every 30 seconds. and last year one million new books, approximately one million new books were published. so in ten years we've gone from 50,000 new books to one million. the vast majority of those, as you might imagine, are self-published, and companies

like author solutions in indiana have purchased a lot of self-publishing businesses, and they actually do what they do very well, but the majority of these books are not being sold through normal channels. and they're also not being sold widely. the average sale of an author solutions book is under is 00 -- 1 00 copies. after family members, there aren't many books being sold. the number of publishers has also skyrocketed, there are about 17,000 in the united states today. the technology is much easier to work with, typesetting, printing is easier. so there are many more

publishers, many more books being published. now you have e-books entering the fray, and that, i predict, is going to ratchet up the title output even faster because a lot of authors will just skip the book and go straight to the e-book. and i have a lot of second thoughts about that. what is selling in the world of a million new titles a year? well, i would say probably two-thirds of those books are fiction and half of those are erotica. and that means almost half of the million are erotica. and i guess these are fantasies that authors are putting down on paper. i'm not sure who the customers are, but they're having a lot of fun writing them anyway. [laughter]

so let me talk for just a little bit about e-books. if you talk about different categories, it's much higher or lower. fiction/nonfiction doesn't sell as well as fiction, and erotica fiction sells better than fiction. so a lot of what's being sold through e-books is fiction, and a lot of that is erotica. the nonfiction space, i think, will probably double, e-book sales will probably double this year. they'll still be under 10% in the nonfiction category, but that's double which means that our sales which are tracking pretty much along these lines going from 3% in '09 to 6%, this year i think they'll be 10-12%, that's a doubling of sales.

now, what does that mean to us as publishers? it's actually great news because we don't have to pay to print and bind and ship and run warehouses to sell these things. my bank loves it because the margin on these books is much better, and literary agents like gail will tell you that's good for authors as well as publishers. so the margin really is significantly better, and the economics of the book business are getting better because of e-books. so as e-books grow, i think that the importance of publishing, the power of the industry, the strength, economic strength of the industry will improve, and that's all good. um, kindle is the number one, best selling e-book by, i think, a wide margin.

and most people i speak to and i ask people this question all the time seem to think that the kindle is the easiest on the eye for long form reading. my wife loves her kindle. the ipad is also very popular, but they have two different strategies. kindle's strategy is to be an inch deep and a mile wide, all things for all people, make available every single book. it's the same strategy that amazon has followed in any category which they're retailing. so they are making available a huge number, millions of titles, and selling small quantities happily whereas the apple ipad has taken exactly the opposite tack. just as they did when they opened up itunes. they are going deep into categories where they know best selling fiction primarily and

best selling nonfiction sell. so they're not interested in being all things to all people. they want to sell bestsellers by best selling authors which come mostly from major publishers. so it's a completely different business model. they're also following something called the agency plan model where they're sharing 70% of the revenue with the publisher as opposed to kindle which is using what i think is an outdated model, the retail model which, h is really like selling a book to a bookstore at 50% off. then third would come the barnes & noble nook, the new color nook is on display over at the tent here. and they claim to have 25% of the market. there's big news that barnes & noble may be purchased by john malone's liberty media which is probably good for barnes & noble. and we want to see barnes & noble survive. we want to see borders survive, too, and we're working hard with them to try and keep them alive.

then there's the sony reader, the motorola zoom. but the real wildcard, in my opinion, is google. unlike all of the others, google does not have a dedicated device. google is selling content through the cloud to anyone's device. it could be an ipad, it could be -- anything but kindle because kindle won't sell google products. but you can purchase google content on a blackberry, on your pc, whatever. and the big advantage that google has is because they've been digitizing books much longer than anyone else, they have a much larger stable of contents. and i think that they could be a very, very significant player. they just lawned their new e -- launched their new e-book business in december, but i would watch them very carefully. there are, altogether as far as

we know, 50 customers buying e-books right now. many of them are aggregators buying books for libraries and library consortiums such as e-brary, net library. it was just bought by nepsco. so i'll just conclude by saying my biggest concern about the proliferation of the new titles whether it be paper or e-book is that it's by removing what publishers provide, we're going to be flooded with an awful lot of books that probably shouldn't have seen the light of day. [laughter] and i hate to be sounding what may be an elitist note, but then again i am here to talk up publishing. and publishing does provide an important filter and, hopefully, protect the public from some of

the credit that might otherwise be hoisted upon them. so i think i'll stop right there. [laughter] >> thank you, jed. our next panelist is geoff shandler. geoff is the editor in chief of little brown and company, one of america's oldest publishers. he started at random house in 1993, and among the authors he's et did -- edited are malcolm gladwell. his d.c. authors include garrett graph, and his greatest moment occurred this year when michael connolly named the law firm shandler, massey and ortiz which is just first but probably not his last cameo appearance in a book. jeff, welcome. >> hello. i'm going to be quick because i think questions will be more interesting. and there may be things said

here that will be different because we're a different kind of publisher. i'm speaking for myself, not for little, brown or the french company that owns us. i want to talk about library furniture. and there's a reason for that, and actually this is a perfect place for it because, um, of mark. the transit system here. there's another mark, an marc as well which is a system that was introduced in the early '60s to automate the transfer of recording bib lo graphic information. so it came at a time when the digital revolution was really starting, it had started earlier, but it was getting going, and it was a great idea which was to create an electronic card catalog. and if you were born probably before 1980, you'll remember card catalogs. card catalogs were pretty sweet. they were, like, these big things, and they had shelves, and they were two feet deep, and

you'd pull them out, and they had the cards. and the cards were the entire library cataloged by number and within alphabetical name of author name and these sorts of things. and they were fantastic almost in the same way library stacks are fantastic in that there was a certain degree of serendipity when you looked up a book. assuming you knew what you were looking for, you had to laboriously leaf through these cards. and you'd often find something you never expected to get. there was just such a wealth of it. i mean, i grew up in a town where there was one library, and be it wasn't a huge library, but even its holdingsings were, to my mind as a kid, massive. and one of the great liberating things about a card catalog even in a small library was not only did i realize there were more books out there than i could ever read, i realized there were more books out there that i wanted to read. and i would find stuff after stuff and wandering the stacks on the way to something else.

i would stumble upon a whole set of shelves that was nothing i expected and then devote myself to those. in college, i went to a college with a fantastic library, one of the world's biggest libraries, and it was amazing to go in the stacks and not only would you find millions of books, but old books just on the shelf to take off. there was a rare books library where i went to school that was so amazing, um, and i'm not entirely sure this is true, though everyone said it and it's been published and this, but the rare books library has its core in the middle where they kept the seriously rare things like the bibles and things like this. and if there there was a nuclear attack, this core would sink into the ground and be entombed and be saved. >> [inaudible] >> it's at yale.

so there is something that's fantastic about that serendipitous encounter o books -- with books or other things as well that you didn't expect that divert you in a wonderful way. many of the books i discovered that way turned out to be my favorite books, ultimately. so when we talk about a lot of stuff, and we will, about the digital transformation in the book business, the thing that worries me most is that. we are in a ecosystem, digital ecosystem now which we're all complicit with, often inadvertently, which is that information online has been personalized based on all sorts of interactions you've had with the web that you did not realize were so influential. one of the sites we like to use at work, not surprisingly, is dictionary.com. because, actually, not all of us were english majors. or -- but even then it's a silly thing to rack your brain when you could just look it up. dictionary.com, when you go to

it, embeds 243 little cookies on your computer. every time, right? and that tracks you further. and dictionary.com is doing that to gather information about you, because they look at what you looked up, and they can extrapolate from that, and they sell that to advertisers and other companies. you can imagine when you're really consciously, voluntarily putting yourself up on a facebook or gmail where google will scan your mail for key words, stuff like that? there's so much people know about you. they know so much. there's a firm in arkansas, it actually has this four-acre server farm. and you can pay them, and can they'll tell you so much about yourself, they'll even tell you if you're right or left-handed. they know everything, right they know everything. so what happens and maybe you've noticed this as well, some of the ads that you get on the outskirts of these web pages, they're not totally tailored, but they're kind of tailored.

and they stick with you. you could be looking up on kayak which is a travel site, you know, fly to quebec city, right? and then they're like subsequent pages there's little thing about french lessons, you know? [laughter] the kind of thing follows you. you can go from page to page. this is a lucrative business, obviously, for google and facebook and what not. so the good of it, right? wikipedia's amazing. it's fantastic. picture.com is amazing in a lot of ways. but your information and your profile in the mind of advertisers and venn -- vendors becomes very restrictive because it reduces serendipity. when you look for something online, there's the recommends, you know, this panel of things. but it's a tiny fraction of what you'd see if you walked in a bookstore. and, in fact, you'd be faced when you walk in a small

bookstore, you're going to see stuff you never expected to get. there's a really interesting statistic that was out last year from a rival company, michael's, where they did a survey of 43,000 americans, and they looked at book buying. and they found that shoppers who shop online and online booksellers, 28% of them end up buying something they didn't expect to buy. but in physical bookstores 43%. that's a huge 15% spread. and, actually, it's very ominous in a lot of ways for book publishers and authors who are hoping people walk in, walk out with other impulse purchases. that's a huge, huge, huge gap. there are a million great things about online book selling. it's been a very good business so far for us. sites where you can buy books are amazing. again, i grew up in a small place. i could not buy, you know, 0.000 whatever percent of the books that i can buy now.

it's fantastic. but we are in a feedback loop, and i think it extends not just to books, but to politics and all that stuff when you're increasingly with the people who are like you, who like the same things as you, you are an algorithm based upon what you've already encountered, and it's sometimes right and sometimes wrong. here we are in a metro area without a book review section anymore which is amazing given washington. there's not one in los angeles which is book for book the best hardcover-buying city in america. so what are these filters, what is coming through, and how do you subscribe,? i think, ultimately, you'll have such a narrowing, you guys can agree on this or not, the kinds of books we are exposed to, and if you're not exposed to it, you don't know about it. for us, certainly, a huge challenge now is figuring out how do we surprise people?

and the card catalog, not to put too much into it, card catalog is 1789 in the france, right? so the card catalog is linked, if for not other reasons, historically with the kind of enlightenment set of values. and there is something about a card catalog that is absolutely amazing. and i go back next weekend is my 20th reunion at college, and i had gone back there last year to speak and went in the big library, and there were the card catalogs, and it was so amazing. i was so psyched. there had been an online digital catalog when i was there, and i went to the shelves, and they're all empty. thousands and thousands. of and, in fact, there are universities, i think nyu did it, there was such a celebration, they burned the cards. it was like a big thing, right? so, again, lots of advantages. it's very cool to have interlibrary loans in a way you couldn't have with an old card

catalog, it's great. but this is an old thought. technology has pluses and minuses, and for us a real challenge now is how do we surprise people when they're going to buy books? and that is something we have to solve or the market is going to be narrow, narrow, narrow, the same things we talked about. and, you know, one last example of this is the long tail argument which is that because of inventory, you know, everything can be found. there's truth to that, but at the same time in the movie business ten years ago they thought that would lead to this explosion of independent films that were financially successful. and the truth is it's been the opposite. you've had more and more of the avatars, the big comedies, the independent film market has effectively died in america in terms of theatrical release. so i don't think we're living in an era where people are going to find everything. in fact, there is great tendency for the big blockbuster stuff to be stronger and strengther and stronger. so we look for help in figuring

out how to break that. small bookstores are certainly a way, but not the only way, and there are issues there too. >> thanks, geoff. our next panelist is actually from a bookstore, mark laframboise from politics & prose independent bookstore. i actually bought a copy of the book "traffic" there last year. mark's been a bookseller working at independent news sources since 191. he began working in graduate school in may con, illinois, and eventually became the head buyer and store manager at the stone lion bookstore in fort collins, colorado, for five years. he has spent the last 13 years at politics & prose and is on the executive board at the new atlantic independent booksellers association, the regional booksellers trade organization covering new york, new jersey, pennsylvania, maryland, delaware, northern virginia and washington d.c. mark, welcome. >> [inaudible]

>> i'm going to read mine. in my opinion -- >> [inaudible] >> in my opinion, right now is a great time to be an independent bookseller. with challenge comes opportunity, and so with great challenge comes great opportunity. so we have great challenges. the challenges we face are real. the increasing e-book sales percentage as books sold dominated by giants like amazon and apple, although we do sell e-books too. in case you're wondering, you can why them for us -- buy them from us. gamed social media and all the existing video, et, and the steady rides of prices for both hard cover and paperbacks that's

going to discounters. we've faced encounters before, so-called superstores in the late '90s and 2000s by e-retailers whosoever have not been obligated to charge sales tax to name just a couple, and yet we survive. while the idea let alone the reality of a neighborhood bookstore may seem quaint to some, their importance can't be overstated. whether it's through the hosting and sponsoring of neighborhood bookers and listing experts in their field, providing meeting space for neighborhood activism, aiding in fund raising for schools, churches and synagogues, organizing trips in and out of our immediate areas not to mention the stocking of books, entertaining readers of every age who walk in our doors, we serve as a center for intellectual and creative life in our community. authors and publishers depend on them to not only make books available, but to act as a

bridge between their community and the authors' work. highlighting particular books to display a traditional newsletter and author events. even with the arrival of e-books, though, the printed book is far from dead. worldwide one million new titles will be published in 2011. and the u.s. figures out new books and new editions of old ones, but the bigger 288,355 suggest a healthy book market. this doesn't account for the explosion of nontraditional books like self-published books and on demand books which account for another almost three-quarters of a million books. and these figures all came from the chronicle of higher education, "five myths about the information age." in that same article, this year e-books are expected to reach 15 or even 20%, but there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time. our story approached a gentleman

covering a gentleman carrying a stack of hard cover books. we offered to order it for him. he declined and said he'd probably just download it to his e-reader. i think the competing platforms -- e-books, hard cover, paperback books -- are going to coexist. and i'll go out on a limb and predict that readers will read books. our challenge on all the panel is to grow readership. as an independent bookstore, we hope they buy traditional, physical books, but for right now i think it's our challenge to find readers whether they're reading on an e-platform or a regular book. challenges are best met head on, and we as independent booksellers or at politics & prose more particularly, we'll continue what we do best: acting as a bridge between our community and the writer/book world, challenging our customers

with the rich variety of books for sale, providing a platform and a stage for authors to present their work and making use of available resources to achieve our goals. we can't just announce or insist upon relevancy, we have to demonstrate it every day. so i think that, um, the biggest challenge, like i said, is to find more readers. and whether they're reading it on an e-reader or plain old, regular, traditional book that we love, um, our biggest challenge is to turn nonreaders into readers. >> thanks so much, mark. our final panelist is gail ross, she's the president of ross yoon literary agency, and she says that each of her new projects must meet two important criteria. it must make her daughters proud, and it must offset their college educations. [laughter] she sincerely believes the phrase, "books change lives. "she represents an important

idea of nonfiction and has earned the reputation in the industry for providing rigorous, enthusiastic editorial guidance at all stages of the publishing process. through the agency's blog and regular happy hours, she also encourages her writers to view themselves as members of a literary community helping one another towards success. she's also a media lawyer with tryst ca, ross, shadler and gold where she advises individuals, companies and nonprofits on copyrights, new media and licensing. gail, welcome. >> you're right. anything you put on the internet you're about to hear back, right? so you've got to make sure that one child is already through college, and the other's almost done. so now i can take five. and part of what i'm here today to do is talk about money and authors in this new environment. but before i do that, i wanted to say a couple of things about the state of the book from my perspective.

i've had the wonderful, wonderful privilege of working in this business for as both a media lawyer for about 30 years and as a agent for 22 of those years. in d.c. which i think is in a lot of ways the nonfiction capital of the country. and it's been -- and i've also seen a lot of this ec-book -- e-book revolution because i was working on electronic journal contracts for some of the learned societies that i've represented over the years as early as 1990. so i have, i've seen a lot, and i must say this last year is about the most positive year i've seen. i was saying to someone in new york just last week that the mood -- and i go to manhattan a lot -- the mood in publish ago year ago was much different than it is today. there's -- we're starting to understand what's going on, and there's one, the president of one company said to me that she feels like it's the wild west

now, but she feels like at least she's had 30 years experience, but she feels like she's start anything a totally new job. but she brings 30 years' experience to it, so she feels better than she did a year ago. it's an interesting time. we're making up years, working on contract language has been both befuddling and challenging and exciting because a lot of this language about e-book rights versus enhanced book rights versus multimedia book rights is all in play and confusing us all and making my authors terribly frustrated at times. and different people at different publishing houses are responding to our entreaties about that in different ways. but it happens to be a very nice business, and people are generally collaborative and generally are seeing that authors and publishers -- for the most part -- are on the same page and have the same

interests. and really, fundamentally, we all share the same interests that mark spoke about which is getting more people to read. i've become quite agnostic about what the device is. i just want the next generation to read more. i mean, i'd be interested in the statistic. one statistic you didn't say was how many americans buy weeks at all -- buy books at all, and that's a fairly low percentage, and i worry about that. so, i mean, i love my hard cover books, but whatever anybody buys is fine with me. now, one of the reasons why i love my hard cover books is because of how my authors get paid for the hard cover royalty versus the electronic book royalty, and that's a little bit of what i wanted to show today. as you may or may not know, the traditional royalty structure for a major, a book from a trade publisher is a list prison royalty, and it's based -- so that's based on, for purposes of

this i'll talk on the price of the book, okay? the actual price of the book. so if you're getting, say, 15% royalty and we're talking about a $26 book, that's $3.90 that's credited to the author's royalty account, okay? that's for a hard coffer book. now, if your using what we call the agency model as jed mentioned for an e-book, the publisher sets the price. it's usually $12.99 or $13.99. let's just say $13 so i can keep my math simple. then what the author gets is 25% of the net received by the publisher. okay? so in this case the i store or whoever it is, even amazon with most of these publishers now is paying 70% of the $13. so that's $9.10 to the

publisher, 25% of that is $2.28. so it's that same book being published at the same time as your hard cover to the author, royalty of $3 -- whatever i just said -- $3.90 versus $2.278 when the hard cover is out. now, when the trade paperback is out, it's a little bit different, and, in fact, the money to the author's account from the e-book sale is better. but the trade paperback, it has a $15p book is what we call them as opposed to a print book, $15 retail. the net to the publisher is $7.50, and 7.5% list price royalty which is what's typical on the trade paperback net to the author $1.13, okay? so that's for the trade paperback. when you look at if trade paperback is out, you're looking at a $10 retail. that's pretty much what the publisher, the $10 retail online

for a e-book. that's what the publisher's going to price it at is $10. so they get 70%, right? the same 70% which is a net to the publisher of $7, and then the author's getting 25% of that net to the publisher. so in this case the author's getting $1.75. so when the trade paperback is out, the e-book royalties is better for the author. but when the hard cover is out, the royalty from the e-books is less advantageous. now, the interesting thing that has happened and this is where many of us have been very upset at times. the question of when did we publish the e-book as compared to the hard coffer? in the beginning -- hard over. in the beginning there was a move that there was a period of time, for some people six months, for others six weeks, but that there was a period of

time when people could buy the hard coffer, and the e-book wasn't available. and it was a lot of discussion, a lot of -- i'm sure geoff can talk about this. but the forces out of the corral -- the horse is out of the corral, and that's not going to change now so that the e-book is published simultaneously with the hard cover. and so if you can get the e-book for $3 online, do you really -- $13 online, do you really want to pay $26, or even the discount you'll find in a bookstore, there is a difference. there's definitely a difference. so those are some of the numbers, so it has had an effect on advances that are provided to authors. how much, i can't really tell because it's too early. and the publishers are having a hard time putting on n a factor for how many books they're selling. i only do nonfiction, and it's pretty much only 10-15%. as jed was saying, in his case

it's gone from three to six in the one year. it's going up, but in the fiction world it's very, very different, and there's been a huge impact there because in some cases publishers are seeing 50% of their fiction titles being sold electronically. so that has a huge, huge effect on these royalties. and especially when the hard covers are out as jed said. so i used to go around the country talking about e-books and saying that i would never -- people my age or older would never read an e-book if they were prone, you know, on a bed, on a beech, on a couch. -- on a beach, on a couch. but i've become a total ipad junkie, i have to say. i did a very interesting thing recently, i was just in europe, and i had an experience i've never had before. e typically read fiction for pleasure, and i always read one novel at a time, and i'm totally engrossed, and i love it. well, i was going to paris, and i was reading the