Archive for Februar, 2010

I. If you are a bestselling star novelist, you do not need a publishing company between you and and your readers.

II. If you are brand new, arrogant and avantgarde, you do not want a a publishing company between you and and your readers.

III. Receiving thirty percent of a digital book’s cover price from Amazon feels like theft if you are a publisher.

IV. Receiving thirty percent of a book’s cover price from Amazon feels like a bonanza if you are an author.

V. If you are a reader, you do not care about authors and publishers, analog and digital. You care about good stories.

VI. The first print bastion to fall will not be book, but comic publishers.

VII. Agents und publisher’s long monopoly has convinced them they know what people want to read.

VIII. Agents and publishers do not have an inkling what people want to read.

IX. The length of books does not have anything to do with artistic decisions; it is merely a function of production logic.

X. The second golden age of pulp fiction short stories is upon us.

XI. Newspapers have a size advantage over computer screens; the only advantage books have over e-readers is battery life.

XII. When you can reduce the weight of “War & Peace” by 80 percent, you have got a winner.

XIII. When you can enable people to read “The Adventures Of A Slut” unnoticed in public, you have got a winner.

Note: Okay, I know that the internet is full of manifestos these days. While the idea of adressing issues about the future of media, journalism or the internet through apodictic Moses-style prose seems to be very popular, it also can be extremely preposterous and leaves a lot to be desired; but when you think about what e-readers will do to books (as I have been frequently in the last couple of months) you realize that apart from specific business-model and technology considerations, there are quite a few very fundamental truths (okay, probably too big a word) about the impending book revolution that one might consider to be axiomatic – manifestoish stuff, sort of.

That is to say we do know a few constituting elements of the revolution to come, but not the ramifications – they are known unknowns and unknown knowns in the Rumsfeldian sense. Flatly predicting that the book as we know it will be dead in 10, 20 or 50 years is lacking in humility in my opinion, as is telling publishers precisely what they ought to do. I all sounds too much like another swankypants manifesto to me. So let’s call the above statements observations, not commandments or truths. I hope you have fun with them.