the Cassandra Sydrome

The Last Samurai is, for the time being, well and truly out of print. Not because sales of a paltry few hundred a year had caused its publisher to lose heart. No. How to gesture at the situation without aggravating?

Faithful readers of pp may remember that I did not want to publish the book as a first novel, because a debut novelist is in a weak position; I thought permissions would be a nightmare, copy-editing would be a nightmare, typesetting would be a nightmare, and in short I felt I could do a better job of defending the book if I were in the position of, say, Salman Rushdie. Jonathan Burnham (editor), Steve Hutensky (friend who showed the book to Jonathan) and Larry Shire (lawyer recommended by Steve) pooh-poohed these fears to a man.  Suffice it to say that it was the fate of Cassandra never to be believed.

It's at times like this that the old Secondhand Sales Donation comes into its own.  New copies, as new copies, very good and good copies are available on Amazon Marketplace.  A very good copy, for example, is available from Bacobooks for just $2.50 plus $3.99 p&p.  Easiest thing in the world to buy this very good copy for a friend, send the author a $1 royalty-equivalent, and make TWO people happy. (Acceptable copies start at $0.24, but these are probably not gift-standard editions.)

Even when the book was in print, readers who generously sent a donation after buying the book secondhand were doing as much to pay the author's rent, and so give time to finish new books, as those who equally generously stumped up for a new copy.  So thank you, thank you all.  New readers can try out the PayPal button in the sidebar if so inclined.

secondhand sales revisited

Nathan Bransford, an agent at Curtis Brown, urges his readers to buy new books because authors don't get money on secondhand sales. We-e-e-e-l-l-l-l-l......

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers who bought secondhand copies of The Last Samurai and sent a token of their esteem to the author via PayPal. I'd especially like to thank the reader who generously sent $150, thereby enabling me to buy a decadent sofa on eBay (you know who you are) and the five readers who sent donations of $50, enabling me to splash out on Michael Crawley's The R Book, Deepayan Sarkar's Multivariate Plots in Lattice and other indispensable works of reference. But I'd also like to thank the hundreds of readers who took the time to send a donation of a dollar or so, when it would be easy to think the amount was so small it would make no difference. It does make a difference. In this case, the difference between buying BonaVista's MicroCharts and prudently deferring in the interest of more or less manageable credit card debt.

I seem to have fallen into a humorous tone which does not really express my feelings. I'm always touched when a reader takes the trouble to do this. You didn't have to do it. It's completely optional. You're absolutely entitled to buy a secondhand book; it's not obligatory to send something to the author, it's just an unbelievably nice thing to do. So thank you all very much.

[For those new to the topic, the original post on secondhand sales, global warming and authors' finances is here.]

Gute Bücher

Walked toward Mehringdamm planning to buy plastic sandals. Stopped by the new used book store, Gute Bücher, in what used to be the Thai grocery store, near the corner of Mehringdamm and Yorckstrasse. The owner was opening up for the day, setting out books on tables outside. I said I had finished the book I had bought the other day and would bring it back so he could sell it again.

'Which book was that?'
'Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel.' It's not exactly the case that I couldn't put it down, since I had to put it aside for all kinds of reasons, but I finished it, which is more than can be said for most of the books I start. It has a glowing comment on the cover by Philip Pullman, 'one of the greatest ghost stories in the language,' which seems strong for a book that gets steadily less frightening as one reads on. The story is that of a medium who is pursued by fiends.

The owner and I, anyway, talk on. His name is John Russell. He explains that he wanted to live in Germany, and it's hard for Americans to get permission. So for a while he and his friends ran an online bookstore, and they all managed to survive selling books online. He then got the idea of having a small shop, which you can afford to do here, he explains, because it's so cheap: he's paying 500 euros a month for the shop, on a year-and-a-half contract. He's not sure if it was a good idea, it's just about breaking even but it's much more work. The main thing is, though, that it allows him to stay in the country.

I am very impressed by this. Every so often I pass empty commercial premises for rent and think of opening a shop and then don't.

   Between the idea
   And the reality
   Between the motion
   And the act
   Falls the Shadow

I come home and get an e-mail from a reader asking why there is little display of emotion in The Last Samurai.

mens conscia something something something tristatur

Coming soon to paperpools...

harrumph.

Hello, hello? Is anyone there? *posts blog entry, checks if it's there, goes back to edit it* Haha, this is so cool! I'm actually writing a blog on paperpools! One of my very own! Which will be read by countless individuals, upon which a virulent swarm of memes will be unleashed from my sentences, infecting readers worldwide with my thoughts. Soon enough, everyone will be doing my bidding. And then finally... an end to undotted fretboards on classical guitars! *shakes raised fist*

Ahem. (But this is still so cool!)

So, where were we... Yes, right, I might as well start off by introducing myself. I'm Hassan, a recent graduate from an over-rated west coast university (well actually, it wasn't so bad but it suffers from the general malaise that probably all brand-name universities have but that's another story), and I'm trying to think through how best to solve the problem of secondhand sales through some sort of an online platform.

How to find a system that involves readers and writers in a mutually beneficial system of exchange outside of the publishing norm isn't a trivial problem, and it is something that I think will be solved after many iterations of refinement. So, I set out to write what I thought would be a fairly straightforward version 1.0, and realized that doing so wasn't quite as trivial as I thought.

What this piece of software will do:

It's a little webpage interface where you can see a little goggle map at the top of the screen, and a webform at the bottom, where you fill in some information in fields. Not sure what exactly, but the basics would be name, e-mail address, and physical address. On the google map there will be a pointer that you can slide around, and after placing the pointer at where you live in the world and filling in the form, you click the save button.

Then, that saves your info into a database, after which you're taken to a page with another google map, where you can see the locations of all the readers of The Last Samurai/paperpools readers (sorta one in the same, right?) yourself included as multicolored pointers, with associated info, perhaps name and address alone at this point, not sure. Feel free to put in a fake name and/or a partially complete address if you're anxious about that, specifics aren't really essential.

Why:

First off, Helen and I think it'd be kinda cool to see where all the readers of the blog and the book come from, like for instance, I myself read the book back when I was in Ghana before leaving for college, and I'd be curious to see if there any other readers of that British Council Library copy that ended up here as well, not to mention a wonder of where else The Last Samurai has managed to find itself. But apart from that, since I'll have e-mails stored in a database, via me, users could potentially get in touch with one another for things like asking questions, setting up secondhand exchanges of books, or just whatever, who knows. I mean after all, we all read the book and liked it enough to either find our way here or just be the one that plain wrote it, so chances are we are a collection of similar-minded individuals, and this application should lend us probably welcome extended possibilities of interaction.

I guess what would happen is, if you want to get in touch with someone you see in an interesting part of the globe, e.g. say you're Helen, and you're, I dunno, wondering whether the Italian translation of the book used italics for the parts that are actually in Italian or some such thing, I'd shoot the Milanese user an e-mail, ask if they don't mind me giving their e-mail address to her, and they'd hopefully be like naturalmente. This is of course not a very graceful way of doing things, and ideally, I'd like an instant messaging system so people could self-regulate their privacy, but my current coding skills would make a mountain out of the activation energy required to do that. Hold that thought, because we're coming to why we haven't seen anything yet. So yeah, if people in general are uncomfortable about handing over their e-mail address over to human eyes, do let me know and I can figure something else out. Of course I'd say so, but rest assured I'd have no bad designs upon your e-mail addresses. If this does turn out to be a concern, along with the instruction manual on the page, I'll give you a dummy or proxy e-mail address you can use, because I'm using e-mail addresses as the unique identifiers for people. I guess I could log your IP address instead, but then what about a situation where two people use the same computer or internet router, I guess I could be clever and use an encrypted hash of IP + e-mail address, I dunno, we'll see.

So, you said something earlier about this being straightforward, right? So what gives? Where is this webpage?(!!):

As it turns out, I'm actually not technically a computer scientist by training. I did something called symbolic systems, which is essentially the approaching of cognitive science from all directions. These include philosophy of both the logical atomatism and white Greek-robe variety, psychology, linguistics, statistics, in my particular focus music cognition, as well as several others. Because we now like to think of the mind as of a computer that gets input from the senses, processes it, and outputs in the form of information, those several others would be artificial intelligence theory, computer science in the pure sense, and last but not least, three mandatory computer programming classes.

These three classes are not your average programming classes. Apart from the fact that OK, well, fine, the school is Stanford, where software development is pretty much how we got where we are, these three classes are designed to cover everything, in fact, even the Computer Science majors themselves don't take much more than those 3 in terms of purely programming classes. But that's just it. They're programming classes, not programming language classes. So while I can come up with algorithms for most problems, I was too busy doing random other things to bother learning web development languages not covered in class. Like PHP/mySQL. The precise tools needed for the job, it turns out, for what will come out is actually more of a version 1.1 than a 1.0.

PHP/mySQL at this level really isn't hard. It's just that learning a new language is such an effort. I'm mostly done with understanding how it works, and now it's actually time to write it. Which again. Is such an effort. Each time you test it and it doesn't run it's like a mini-heartbreak, and the average day can see maybe 200 failed test-runs... sigh.

Don't get me wrong, no, I'm dying to see this thing up and running. It's just that coding for me on a given day is a matter of having the right sort of chi*. And being in the post-graduation ether all caught up with things like finishing up the last bits of paperwork, wondering where to move, move at all?, working at my fake job, applying for real ones and interviewing but then should I just stop all that and apply to grad school like I originally planned, etc. etc., so when one does get free time, it's hard to decide to use it up on coding, never an easy choice at the best of times. But I'll definitely get around to it, though. Sooner still if perhaps I heard from you guys with questions, comments, suggestions that sort of thing. Anything that makes the coding seem less of a solitary activity. So yeah, please do give me some feedback. Google maps thing, good idea, bad idea? Ideas for improvement either in the short-term/long-term, what is secondhand sales exactly?, etc.

But yeah, that's what I've been kinda up to, and also what there will be to look forward to on paperpools.


* The right sort of chi: Many things contribute. For instance, on the days when I'm being productive, if I manage to seize the moments before the point where I become self-congratulatory after which I stop doing any work, I may code then. Coding is also likely after a good game of chess. There are others. But most predictably, I will have all the right sorts of energy to code when there is a fire underneath me, such as a good old-fashioned hard deadline. Oh, see me go! I've turned unviewed homework handouts into limping bits of submittable code in record time when told on a Friday that the submission date was moved forward to next week Tuesday, before the 5-day Thanksgiving break instead of after it. I tried to make this work for me; I would have liked to have unveiled the working webapp in time for Helen's birthday, alas, all the best intentions didn't get me past merely setting up a database, maybe a table as well. So I guess that's that for deadlines... Although if I do move from Palo Alto, I'd like to finish it while I'm sure where all the internet is. We'll see...

ps: What a long post!

Another Country

Getting ready for winter. Clearing the apartment. In winter Berliners with Kohlheizung -- coal-burning ovens -- wear 5 layers of clothes indoors. They quit smoking in September (the windows won't be opened for 5 months).

I had a small suitcase full of books that I had wanted to get rid of, and a small stack of books on a chair. I hate going to secondhand bookshops with books to sell, so I had cleared the books off the shelves months ago and then left them. Today I went to Another Country, a secondhand bookshop in Riemenstraße that sells English books. It operates partly as a bookshop, partly along the lines of a video rental store: if you buy a book you can bring it back and they will give you what you paid for it, minus €1.50 -- the difference from a video rental store being, of course, that you can keep it as long as you like and still pay only €1.50 for the rental. While Alan went through the books Tim said the good thing about the system was that it meant they always had good books in stock: in other 2nd hand shops all the good books go as soon as they come in, and then sit on a shelf in someone's room. I said yes, these were books I did not expect to read again, or not any time soon, so I would rather they were available to other people; when I lived in South America we were dependent on the supply of cast-off paperbacks that people had happened to bring with them and leave behind, and though there were more English-language books in Berlin it was still better to have them in circulation.

Tim (or possibly Tom) said they showed films; they were showing Blow-up on Friday, Georgie Girl next week. Alan offered me 40 euros for the books; I said I would be happy to take a credit, so he offered 45. He then showed me a room in the basement full of science fiction, and recommended two books by M. John Harrison, Viriconium Nights and Travel Arrangements. They had a large selection of books by Ballard. He said Ballard had been made a figurehead of New Wave science fiction; Michael Moorcock had taken over the editorship of New Worlds, previously a traditional sci fi magazine, and turned it into a magazine with very innovative writers, getting funding from the Arts Council (for science fiction! unheard of!) and Ballard was one of the writers he had published extensively in the magazine -- though not necessarily a writer who could live up to the expectations placed in a figurehead.

This looked like a good system. I felt I was not being as vivaciously thrilled as the excellence of the system and recommendations of Alan deserved -- my mind was taken up with the business of getting ready for winter, and the question of whether I might finish another book in the month before winter set in, and the question of whether it might be possible to sublet the apartment to someone recently returned from Antarctica and so spend the winter in Morocco -- so I greeted each new amazing feature of this innovative bookstore with faint Wows and Greats, feeling that the really important thing was that I had transferred books that had been in a small suitcase for 6 months to the custody of professionals. But it is a good system. Another Country has a website, here. If you're not in Berlin, you could recommend the system to your local source of secondhand books.

Jihad & secondhand books

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), under threat of a law suit, Cambridge University Press has just agreed to pulp all unsold copies of the 2006 book, Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World. According to the Chronicle, this is the fourth such book on terrorism funding to be pursued by a libel action.

more at National Review Online

Deborah Lipstadt discusses the issues here.

We've talked before about why we might want a scheme that enabled buyers of a secondhand book to send money to its author. Academic presses don't usually offer advances; if CUP pulps this book, a writer who took on an important and (evidently) dangerous topic will get royalties on copies already sold and no more. Since readers normally have no way of contacting authors directly, they can't show their support even if they want to.

Secondhand Sales & Web 2.0

Hassan Abudu, who has recently graduated from Stanford, is trying to work out how secondhand sales and other exchanges that recycle books might be meshed with some sort of system that could benefit writers (e.g. through something like Facebook). If any other readers have ideas he would be interested to hear from you; he can be contacted at meyian (at) gmail (dot) com.

Greening of Books

Geographical distribution of copies of The Last Samurai available through Abebooks on 11 June, 2007 can be seen here.

PayPal Account of Helen DeWitt on 14 June, 2007:


These exhibits are the result of the following e-mail correspondence:

E-mail from Helen DeWitt to George Monbiot on 10 April 2007

 Mr Monbiot

I'm a writer, with a book that sold 100,000 in English and was published
in 19 countries. Is it sad that the book did not sell 1 million, like
Captain Corelli's Mandolin or White Teeth?

118 copies are available on Amazon.com for 50 cents and upwards. I only
get paid if a new object is manufactured and sold. On the sale of a new
object for $11.99 I get 90 cents.

I've argued to the Society of Authors that it would be better all round
if we changed the system -- if an author's cut were taken for every
secondhand online sale. If we changed the social system, so authors got
"tipped" -- you buy a book secondhand in a shop, it includes the
author's Paypal account, you recycle the object and send the author a
tip if you liked the book.

Libraries are A Good Thing from the point of view of the ozone layer,
and A Bad Thing for an author who gets something like 1p per loan.  I'm
not wildly keen on writing for free, but I'm also not wildly keen on
having  getting a $200K advance to have 100K physical objects pushed
into circulation.  My understanding is that paper manufacture is
horribly expensive in ecological terms.

I would infinitely rather get paid for 10 sales of 1 book than for 10
sales of 1 book; I think ways could be found to recycle packaging and
cut down transport. The Society of Authors remains tamely unkeen.

I thought: Wait. I once met George Monbiot, the Ecowarrior, at the Pater
Society at BNC. I have a Connection. And as E M Forster famously said,
Only connect.

Any thoughts?

Helen DeWitt

Astoundingly swift reply from Monbiot on 17 April 2007:



Dear Helen,

I think this is a great idea.  Hasn't something similar been done for artists?: every time you a painting by a living artist is resold, he gets a cut.  The circulation of books is certainly more environmentally friendly than constant printing.

We do already have a system a little like this in the UK, called public lending rights: www.plr.uk.com. But it would surely make sense to extend this to secondhand sales.  The means you propose sounds plausible.

With my best wishes, George


***

The Society of Authors remains unkeen; the Authors' Guild is unkeen; but two readers have bought copies of The Last Samurai directly from the author, and one has bought a copy of Your Name Here directly from the author, and the fruits of these transactions are to be seen in my Paypal account (I do have more than $36.65 to my name, you'll be happy to hear).

I don't know how to talk round the official bodies -- but I do think the system we have now is very bad for the planet, and it's indirectly also very bad for literature.

Publishers base their decision to publish new books on the sales of the last book -- that is, on sales of new books, not on readers. But hang on just a minute. Sven Birkerts recently nominated The Last Samurai for an article in the New York Review of Books on unjustly neglected fiction, excellent news -- but if you thought you liked the sound of the book, and it wasn't in bookstores (and an "unjustly neglected" work of fiction almost certainly isn't in a bookstore near you), surely you'd either go to your local library (where you can get it free) or to Amazon (where you can get it for $1.70 plus $3.99 postage). If a reader loves the book and keeps a spare copy to lend out to friends, this is VERY VERY GOOD for the planet (not only is the same physical object being used several times, it is being passed around locally, with negligible use of nonrenewable fossil fuels). But none of these ecologically virtuous readers is visible to publishers as a potential buyer of the next book. So all these green readers indirectly sabotage the writer's chance of getting the next book published. Sad but true.

I have no idea how to twist the arm of Jeff Bezos. I have no idea how to get on Abebooks' case. But surely we can do better than this system? Surely what we're up against, really, is not selfishness or greed but a sociological problem -- and the planet is paying the price.

We-ell. One way of looking at it is: the only way to get authors paid on secondhand or borrowed books is to have the system policed. We need the Public Lending Right to collect. We need Jeff Bezos to collect. We need enforcement. Question is, is this actually right? Who polices tipping? In America it's standard to tip 15%, and my mother says she now leaves 20% because the minimum wage has been outstripped by inflation, and NOBODY HAS TO DO IT. It is not standard for readers to send money directly to authors. However much you love a book, it would be very very odd to send a monetary token of your esteem to the person who wrote it. But the fact that this would be odd is in itself odd.

Giving a waitress a $2 tip for a $12 meal does not improve your chances of getting a good meal next time. Giving a waitress a $3 tip for a $12 meal does not improve your chances of getting a better meal next time. No amount of discretionary generosity to a waitress will have any effect on the quality of the next meal. And the institution of discretionary generosity to waitresses, of course, however laudable in itself, offers no obvious ecological benefit.

By way of contrast--

Contemplating the length of this post, I am reminded of J S Mill's comment early in On the Subjection of Women, that when one is arguing against what "everyone knows" one is obliged to go on at great length, because the number of unexamined assumptions is so large. The institutions which govern the sale of books and payment of authors rest on a very large number of unexamined assumptions -- assumptions with unintended consequences. I think it may be better to pursue the subject in a later post.

I comment, however, that I have linked to the satellite version of the Google Map for a reason. Suppose it were possible to locate on the planet all 100,000 copies of the English-language edition of The Last Samurai rather than the 231 on sale at Abebooks, or the 73 available on Amazon. Suppose we knew the cities in which the book was to be found, suppose some of those owners were willing to be contacted by e-mail by would-be readers of the book who lived locally. Suppose would-be sellers of the book registered with the author rather than with Mr Bezos or Mr Abebooks. If such a system could be made to work, I think we could BOTH slash the quantities of books manufactured and hauled across the planet AND reduce authors' vulnerability to profit-hungry agents and editors. I think it would be A Very Good Thing.

Any thoughts?

[PS I see that the link to Google Maps does not, in fact, bring up the satellite view, so I did not have the total artistic control I had hoped for -- if you want the satellite view you will have to manually click Satellite. If you want to see the location of the copy in Permina ND more manual clicking will be required.]