After a lengthy and complex litigation process, today both Google and the following book publisher plaintiffs (The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; Pearson Education, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA) Inc., both part of Pearson; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; and Simon & Schuster, Inc. part of CBS Corporation) announce that a legal settlement agreement has been reached with Google. Both parties claim publicly to be pleased with the outcome.

This agreement establishes a framework to provide access to book publishers’ in-copyright books and journals that were digitized by Google for its Library Project and to govern how such works may be scanned in the future.

The agreement settles the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by five publisher plaintiffs. As is typical of a private settlement between parties, a number of terms are confidential. You can read Google’s press release regarding the settlement however we provide more details below for publishers analysis. The key elements of the agreement:

The agreement settles the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by five publisher plaintiffs.  As is typical of a private settlement between parties, a number of terms are confidential.

The key elements of the book publishing agreement:

1. First and foremost, the settlement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders.  A publisher can choose to make available or remove its works from Google’s programs.
2. The agreement covers US book publishers – those who are members of Association of American Publishers and certain other publishing associations with US publisher members – for in-copyright books and journals in which they hold a copyright interest under US law.
3. The agreement provides for such book publishers to make available or remove scans of their works previously created in the Google Library Project.
4. The agreement provides a set of satisfactory terms as to how future scanning by Google of covered books and journals may be addressed by their publishers.
5. The agreement authorizes Google, through separate agreements with individual publishers, to make commercial use of those scans – particularly in educational math books.
6. The agreement also authorizes Google to enter into file return agreements with publishers.  This gives publishers digital files of their scans for certain authorized uses while also granting Google additional rights.
7. This deal marks the end of seven years of litigation between the publishers and Google relating to the Google Books Library Project.  It secures dismissal of the lawsuit, without prejudice or release of claims, by stipulation of the parties.
8. This settlement does not affect Google’s litigation with the Authors Guild nor does it address the underlying questions in that suit.
9. This differs from the class action settlement rejected by the court in 2011.  It is narrower in scope and effect because it resolves more limited claims by individual plaintiffs rather than a class.
10. There are a number of reasons why the parties chose to make the deal.

For the publishers, they wanted to find a way to move forward and bring this lengthy, complex litigation to an end while building on the existing relationship between publishers and Google.

Publishers’ attempts to settle this through the court were not successful and a private settlement, which does not require the court’s approval, was the most effective means.  Although the settlement does not resolve the disagreements regarding the scope of fair use and other points of copyright law, it resolves to the plaintiffs’ satisfaction the practical issues underlying the dispute which led to the lawsuit.

Google sought to make the deal to bring to an end seven years’ litigation and move ahead with increasing the body of works available in Google Books and Google Play.  This deal proved to be mutually beneficial because it expands eBook discovery and sales while respecting the rights of copyright owners.

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The judge in the Google Settlement case has extended the deadline for talks between the internet giant and the publishers and authors involved.

The deal, which involves a revised book-scanning agreement for out of print titles that may also be in copyright, has already been contested for six years, with five publisher plaintiffs, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) objecting to Google's digital library plans.

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Amazon is turning another page.

After disrupting the retail distribution of books, it appears that the Seattle e-tailer plans to become a major book publisher. Earlier this month, the company announced the launch of Montlake Romance, a new unit that will publish original fiction.

But ConsumerEdge Research financial analyst Faye Landes suspects that Amazon.com’s (ticker AMZN) “plans and ambitions are much broader, and are likely to be highly disruptive to the book industry in many ways.”

Given the company’s track record in electronic commerce and cloud computing, and the way Chief Executive Jeff Bezos thinks, Landes’ speculation doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device already has revolutionized the book publishing industry.

 

Landes predicts that Amazon will set up a book-publishing operation in New York City. She points to last week’s hiring of literary agent and former publishing executive Larry Kirshbaum as another piece of evidence. Amazon’s publishing plans were the focus of discussion last week at an annual publishing trade fair—BookExpo America—held in New York, according to Landes.

After it’s self-publishing venture with CreateSpace, the reason Amazon wants to get into book publishing is closely tied to its commitment to sell both paper and digital books, she explains. After all, books have been the “gateway drug” to Amazon’s electronic-commerce Website ever since Bezos launched his Internet company.

By entering the business, Amazon will gain leverage with other book publishers. But most important, it might provide some defense against Apple (AAPL), whose iPad tablet devices compete with Kindle.

“A robust publishing operation gives Amazon a nice negotiating tool if, as has been speculated periodically, Apple makes noise about taking a big cut of Kindle [content] sales through Apple devices,” Landes posits.

Starting with romance novels makes a lot of sense. It’s one of the most popular categories of e-books, and people who read them tend to read a lot of them—quickly. The digital format is ideal because romance aficionados don’t have to lug all those books around. But Landes expects that Amazon will also expand into other book categories, such as mysteries, thrillers and science fiction.

This probably isn’t good news for other book publishers, which already resent Amazon’s distribution power. The book publishing company is the second-largest seller of physical books, with a 15% market share based on dollar volume, behind Barnes & Noble (BKS), with 23%. Borders Group, which has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is third with 13% but lost share in 2010.

Amazon’s the largest seller of e-readers, with 29% of the market. Apple is second, with 17%, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook device is third, with 8%.

To be sure, selling books over the Internet changed the industry forever and is killing shopping-mall owners as tenant book stores close down. But the game isn’t over. Earlier in May, John Malone’s Liberty Media (LINTA) made a bid to buy Barnes & Noble for $1.02 billion, about nine months after the bookstore chain put itself on the block. Now there are rumors that Liberty is also making a run at Borders.

 

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Picking up where Jane Friedman, book publisher of Open Road Integrated Media, left off yesterday at Digital Book World, when she urged book publishers to broaden the participation of libraries in the distribution of ebooks, LJ’s Josh Hadro moderated a panel today that helped publishers understand why, and how, that must be accomplished.

“Consumers and library patrons are two sides of the same coin,” Hadro said to a roomful of publishers, who included execs and others from the big children’s book publishers, smaller houses, university presses, and distributors. The current one book, one loan ebook model “mirrors the print” buying and lending; “DRM [digital rights management] software [protects publishers] caus[ing] the lend to expire at the end of the loan period,” explained Hadro.

Yet many publishers still don’t sell their latest ebooks to libraries. “Current content is king,” New York Public Library’s Chris Platt said, pointing out his frustration that, “We can’t get Freedom (FSG) as a download for our library. And even though Keith Richards made a public appearance at NYPL, “We couldn’t put his epub [Life (Little, Brown)] in our collection,” said Platt. Then Platt held up The Oracle of Stamboul (HarperCollins), due out in February, another book his patrons won’t be able to borrow as an ebook.

Librarians are left trying to explain to their users both that the publisher has not made the book available through the library and that many ebooks won’t work on their users’ ereaders.

Platt further made the case that “We teach people literacy…we point [them] to your new books….Libraries are connected to many of the people you want to reach, on Twitter, Facebook.” As the price of smartphones drop, he said, libraries will be able “to serve all parts of the community.”

Ruth Liebmann, Random House VP, reinforced Platt’s remarks. “A sale is a sale,” she said, noting that libraries are a revenue stream that publishers like Random want to “protect, even grow.”

Baker & Taylor’s VP for libraries and education, George Coe, told attendees that the “acquisition model will change drastically” with the ebook. “Library budgets can’t change,” he said, but users can become buyers with “buy buttons” on library online catalogs. He cautioned, however, that by using different formats, christian book publishers are “confusing our patrons.”

OverDrive’s CEO Steve Potash also said that the idea of a library purchase “cannibalizing sales couldn’t be farther from the truth…we’re converting library borrowers into point of sale users” in the digital world. As for the one book, one user model, Potash said that OverDrive recently made Liquid Comics ebook graphic novels available via a multiple user subscription model.

The iPad 2 release date remains inexact pending an announcement from Apple but in the mean time the world continues to shift from paper and ink books to e-books and are investing in e-book publishing readers like the Kindle, Nook and potentially iPad.

While many iPad users make use of the device as an e-reader, its 1.5 lbs. and somewhat cumbersome shape does not make it the ideal choice for someone who wants to relax with a book. In its quest to be the ultimate book reading machine the Kindle has resisted “features” like a touch screen that adds to screen glare, color that so far requires an LCD screen that shines in your eyes and a range of applications that might be useful but take away from the phenomenal 1 month battery life.

Because of Amazon’s single minded e-reader focus the Kindle has remained the premier tool for its main job, comfortable book publisher reading.

But budget constraints, the desire for fewer devices, users who are not devoted to reading but do it occasionally, make a place for those who want to forgo the Kindle and use an iPad as their exclusive gadget. It’s not completely exclusive of course because they still need a mobile phone and probably a camera and probably a real computer or laptop, but hey, who’s counting?

So Amazon provides its Kindle e-reading applications on virtually all book publishing platforms and christian book publishers‘ platforms  including tablets, computers and smartphones. Serious readers should not rely on the iPad or iPad 2 for that matter. Pick up a Kindle first for a few bucks, curl up with an eBook and consider whether you really need a tablet too.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has sold more than $150million worth of recipe books, second only to Harry Potter author JK Rowling according to his book publishers.

The 35-year-old has topped the bookselling charts with this 30-Minute Meals cookery book, selling 80,000 copies last week.

Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals is selling almost 80,000 copies a week on the back of a television series and strong promotion by Sainsbury’s, which Oliver endorses.

Tom Weldon, managing director of Jamie’s book publisher Penguin General Books, said: ‘It’s perfect for this moment. People are time-rushed and in this recession want to cook more at home.

‘The reason Jamie has done so well over the past decade is he’s obsessed with every single detail in his books.’

Rowling, 45, and Oliver are the only British authors to have passed the $150 million mark, although Delia Smith has come close, selling more than $100 million worth of recipe books.

Neil Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, the trade magazine, said: ‘There are three reasons for the success of 30-Minute Meals. It’s very zeitgeist. It’s been heavily backed by Sainsbury’s who have a huge market share of the sales. And the accompanying TV show was on every day when mums were making meals for their kids.’

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A new book publishers agreement between Hachette Livre and Google could offer a way forward in the ongoing dispute between authors, publishers and the search engine over the digitising of out-of-print books.

There are between 40,000 and 50,000 books under French copyright that are commercially unavailable but Hachette will have the final say as to what will be scanned. French booksellers will also be able to sell these works.

Speaking yesterday at the announcement that Google can digitise Hachette Livre’s out of print books, Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Book Search, said the deal could “serve as a framework for other French publishers and maybe other publishers around the world”. He added there had been “notional” talks with some British publishers, but no active negotiations were in progress. Hachette UK would not comment on the news.

The dispute between authors, publishers and Google dates back several years. US bodies The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed lawsuits against the search engine for copyright infringement in 2005 after Google had begun digitising books in libraries without authorisation in 2002. Attempts to resolve the issue through the Google Book Settlement – and now the revised Google Books Settlement, currently awaiting judicial approval in the US – have failed to satisfy angry publishers and authors. Novelist Ursula Le Guin led a campaign for a mass opt-out of authors from the revised settlement last year, calling it a “deal with the devil,” while Hely Hutchinson described it as “a weak compromise”. French publishers have also been very active in opposing the settlement.

Under the new deal, Google will be able to scan Hachette Livre’s titles where the publisher wants it to, and will then be able to make them available as ebooks for purchase through Google Books. But the publisher will keep control over which books the search engine has access to and books it doesn’t want digitised will be removed from Google. The search engine won’t have a monopoly on the scanned books either: French booksellers will also be able to sell them.

The deal only applies to Hachette Livre’s French language publishing, but Google has also said it is in “notional” talks with US book publishers about a similar deal. The chief executive of Hachette UK, Tim Hely Hutchinson, declined to comment on whether his publishing house would be following its parent company’s lead.

“Both parties see this as an opportunity to breathe new life into Hachette Livre’s dormant out-of-print works for the benefit of authors,” Google and Hachette Livre declared in a joint statement.

Google senior vice-president David Drummond declared the announcement “a great step for French authors, Google, Hachette and above all, French readers”. He called the agreement “a win-win deal for Google and the French publishing industry”, saying: “French authors will get new opportunities to sell their books and readers throughout the world will gain access to exciting, hard-to-find French-language books.”

The basic terms and conditions of the agreement are to be made available to all French publishers.

But Arnaud Nourry, chairman and chief executive of Hachette Livre, said the new agreement represented a fresh start in the publisher’s relationship with Google. The deal had “nothing to do with a waiver of our claims concerning Google’s past practices, and everything to do with a new and exciting foundation on which to build a fresh start based on fairness, even-handedness and the acknowledgement of our rights and of those of our authors”, he said. He said the agreement “enables us to break the deadlock in an honourable and positive way, while protecting the interests of all parties involved”.

On the surface, the deal achieves a similar result to the Google Books Settlement, though without the costly litigation and long-wait for judicial approval. Piers Blofeld, an agent at Sheil Land, and one of the harshest critics of the original GBS said: “At first look it is a far more collaborative system and crucially Google seem to have come a long way in their interpretation of copyright. This looks like good news.”

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This week Mr. Rosenthal is celebrating a happy landing. On Tuesday morning, it was announced that come January he will be running his own boutique imprint at Penguin Group USA, arguably the healthiest of the big New York Book Publishers as well as home to a number of the 56-year-old’s former colleagues. Once he gets going, Mr. Rosenthal—whose roster at Simon & Schuster included Bob Woodward, David McCullough, Bob Dylan and Jim Cramer—will be on charge of a small but full-fledged operation at Penguin Book Publishers, with dedicated publicity and marketing muscle and a list totaling somewhere between 24 and 36 books per year.

Mr. Rosenthal, an executive known for his eclectic tastes and blunt manner, has published a long list of authors in his 25-year career, including Bob Dylan, James Carville, Jeffery Deaver and Bob Woodward.

Many of those writers will be fair game as Mr. Rosenthal begins to acquire books for his own imprint, setting up competition between Penguin and Simon & Schuster.

Over lunch on Tuesday at the Half King in Chelsea, Mr. Rosenthal said Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy reached out to him shortly after his firing, and had been “aggressive and enthusiastic” in their talks. He is stoked to go work for her, he said: “People at Penguin don’t bitch about their place of employ nearly as much as people elsewhere. Everybody says, ‘The only person you ever want to work for in publishing anymore is Susan.’”

Initially, Mr. Rosenthal considered another path after he was canned—doing something Web-related, for instance, or becoming a packager, a consultant or “a guru of some kind”—but in the end he resolved to stick with traditional book publishing. It wasn’t a self-evident decision, if only because book sales have been falling so severely in recent years that many in the industry are panicked about the long-term viability of their business.

“He has a lot of people he’s been working with for many, many years,” Susan Petersen Kennedy, the president of Penguin Group USA, said in an interview on Monday. “And perhaps at some point, some of them will join him.”

Mr. Rosenthal’s imprint, which has yet to be named, will publish two to three dozen books each year, a mix of nonfiction and fiction.

“I’m going to make lots of trouble,” Mr. Rosenthal said in an interview. “They’re going to let me go after the kind of — I wouldn’t say quirky — but the peculiar stuff that I sometimes like. What they want very much is for me to be able to indulge my passions, indulge my taste.”

For more than a decade, Penguin has focused on creating imprints that reflect the visions and interests of their book publishers, like Riverhead Books, Portfolio and Penguin Press, an imprint created by Ann Godoff after she was fired from Random House in 2003.

Book Publishers have been under pressure from the recession and a depressed retail environment, making it an unlikely time to expand.

“They’re being contrarian, which I like,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Everybody seems to be having misgivings about where this whole thing is going. They’re obviously making a bet. They’re expanding, and it’s great to be part of that.”

Before joining Simon & Schuster, Mr. Rosenthal had been the publisher of Villard, a division of Random House Book Publishers; the managing editor of Rolling Stone; the executive editor of New York magazine; and, as Penguin noted in a news release on Monday, an employee in the morgue at the city chief medical examiner’s office.

In June, Mr. Rosenthal abruptly left Simon & Schuster, the books division of the CBS Corporation, after spending 13 years at the publishing house. He was replaced by Jonathan Karp, the former book publisher of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

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Win or lose at the Scotiabank Giller Prize on Nov. 9,it will be business as usual at Gaspereau Press.

For the first time in its 13-year history, the small, Kentville, N.S. book publishers and printing business has a book in the running for Canada’s most prestigious literary award, Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel The Sentimentalists.

About 800 copies of the book were printed when it was first published a year ago; roughly half sold prior to the novel’s unexpected appearance on the Giller longlist at the end of September. The remaining copies were gobbled up by the time the title made the five-book shortlist in early October. Since then, Gaspereau’s five-person operation has been printing about 1,000 copies a week — the maximum it can handle, given other demands and book publisher responsibilities.

“Whether we win or lose, I’ll continue to make about 1,000 books a week, as long as there is a demand,” says co-owner Andrew Steeves, who runs the business with partner Gary Dunfield.

“One of the problems is that you can’t just drop everything else you do. We’re a local print shop. Long after the Giller goes away, I’ve got other clients. I can’t afford to alienate them. So I have to balance all that stuff.”

This is not remotely the way it will go down if any of the other four publishers with a book in the hunt cashes in.

The Giller, in addition to rewarding the winning author with a cheque for $50,000, is an instant boon to sales. Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man, the most recent beneficiary of what is commonly known in the book publishers industry as the “Giller Effect,” moved 75,000 hardcover copies after winning last year and continues to sell well in paperback.

Publishers are ready to capitalize, sometimes within minutes of the announcement of the winner just before 10 p.m. at the gala’s live telecast.

Windsor’s small Biblioasis, which also has never produced a previous Giller finalist, already has a plan to print as many as 25,000 additional copies of Alexander MacLeod’s debut short story collection Light Lifting.

“As I understand it we won’t even have to call the printers, if against all odds we win,” says publisher Dan Wells. “They’ll be watching at the same time and when it’s announced, they can flick a switch and start printing.”

House of Anansi, a mid-sized Toronto publisher, has produced seven Giller finalists but no winners. The company hasn’t settled on a firm number yet for Kathleen Winter’s Annabel, the only book this year to also be nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award, but president Sarah MacLachlan expects to order a print run of 40,000 copies, if the book wins.

“You talk to basically everybody that would sell a Giller book — the wholesalers, the chain, the independents — and you ask them what they think they will go through,” MacLachlan says.

“We are making a calculated decision. We’re not doing it because that looks like the right number in our heads. Historically, the repercussions have been big, so we’re like lawyers: We work on precedent.”

HarperCollins Canada, a rarity this year as the lone multi-national subsidiary in the mix, will undertake a similar reckoning in the event that David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris takes the prize.

The decision on how many copies to print will be made early Wednesday morning, but company sales and marketing vice-president Leo MacDonald anticipates something on the order last year’s Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which sold 40,000 copies in Canada. The company’s previous Giller wins came in 2001 with Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan and in 1999 with Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House.

“We don’t know what the number will be, but everything is ready to go,” MacDonald says. “It’s about having the paper and all the stock ready for a print run. That’s the first thing you do, as soon as you get nominated.”

Toronto mid-sized publisher Thomas Allen eventually sold 65,000 copies of its 2002 Giller winner, Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe, the vast majority of them after the announcement was made. As with the Clarke book, the book publishers company will take an incremental approach with its current nominee, Sarah Selecky’s debut short story collection This Cake is for the Party.

To this point, 6,500 copies of Selecky’s book have already been printed, which Thomas Allen book publisher Patrick Crean figures is about 10 times the average for a Canadian short story collection.

“We’ll decide quickly, but we’re not going to suddenly print 50,000 copies,” says Crean, adding that the initial order will be in the neighbourhood of 10,000 to 20,000.

“There’s a strong precedent for the Giller Effect. It’s enormous,” Crean says. “Most books sell in the range of 60,000 to 80,000 copies.”

The wild card is that this year’s Giller list, conventionally awash with authors from the bigger publishing houses, is far from typical. The dominance of small publishers, the inclusion of two short story collections and the minimal to non-existent track records of four of the five finalists all make for slightly uncharted territory. Bergen, who won in 2005 for The Time in Between but is hardly a household name, is the best known of the bunch.

“The jury really broke the mold this time,” says Crean of a panel that featured broadcaster Michael Enright, U.S. novelist Claire Messud and U.K. author Ali Smith.

An already significant effort to promote the prize has been ramped up this year. Not only will the Giller gala again be broadcast live starting at 9 p.m. on Bravo!, the station also has been airing a nightly half-hour segment, One Country, Five Books, featuring profiles of each of the shortlisted authors.

Just being nominated has meant that all five books have been reprinted to one degree or another already. Biblioasis printed 4,000 more copies of Light Lifting, after an original run of 3,000, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

“We might have printed 3,000 copies, but our initial orders from independent bookstores and Chapters amounted to 300,” Wells says. “Everybody talks about the Giller Effect. It has been interesting to see what that entails. For a press like ours, it has been enormous.”

It is not as if any of this is entirely lost on the folks at Gaspereau, who have fielded calls from other publishers offering to rush copies of The Sentimentalists into print. But those editions would not have sewn bindings and hand-printed covers.

“If I want to do a mass market version of the book, I can dial a phone as easily as they can,” Steeves says. “But that’s not the way we do books.

“I feed my family doing this, so I’m not some doe-eyed idealist who doesn’t want to sell books. But the caveat is that I sell books by doing them a certain way. It’s important to my life and how I stay sane in the middle of a lot of insanity.”

Steeves points out that of the nearly 200 books published by Gaspereau since its inception, nearly all are still in print.

“I don’t really subscribe to the must-react, panic theory of book publisher marketing. Naively or not, I have more faith in people. If a reader is looking for a book, they’ll wait a week, they’ll wait three weeks. And if they don’t, whatever.

“I’m making books with an eye to eternity — or if not eternity, a very long time. We’re trying to pick really good books. And we’re trying to print them in a way that honours the text.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, authors in the age of the digital e-book might face much the same fate as musicians face in the age of the shareable MP3.

An in-depth analysis on the economy of book publishing shows that as sales of hardcover books continues to plummet, book publishers are signing fewer books, and giving ever-smaller advances to the authors they do sign. “The new economics of the e-book make the author’s quandary painfully clear,” writes the Journal. “A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.”

Ultimately the smaller margins realized from e-books lead book publishers to consolidate their bets on fewer books that still have a chance of becoming bigger hits in hardcover editions. And as the odds on those bets become longer with hardcover sales in decline, publishers are curbing their risks by offering smaller advances to writers.

“They offer, on average, $1,000 to $5,000 for advances, a fraction of the $50,000 to $100,000 advances that established book publishers typically paid in the past for debut literary fiction,” the Journal reports.

Of course, there will always be fiction. The economy of book publishing companies will likely not stamp out writing itself any more than the decline in music sales has rid the planet of music.

But it could amount to a literary race to the bottom, in which the potential Jonathan Franzens of tomorrow simply won’t have the financial incentive to spend 7 years working on their novels, and Franzen did with both “The Corrections” and “Freedom.”

One of the hallmarks of a digital world is supposed to be proliferation: in an age when anyone can distribute content for free, content is supposed to flourish. When any band can record themselves cheaply upload their music to a Schiel & Denver page for free, music is supposed to unfurl out of the confines corporate record labels. And indeed, over 13 million bands have registered pages on Myspace.

But the question remains, How many of those bands are any good? The landscape of bands with national followings doesn’t seem particularly more diverse now than it did in decades past—the difference is that in the self-publishing digital race to the bottom, fewer than ever are being rewarded financially.

The e-book market however, at least at this point, is different than a Myspace-style digital climate in that authors don’t upload books directly. Digital or not, the environment is still governed by publishers looking to stack their chips on a few possible hits. And the returns from those few hits offer smaller returns than ever.

Ironically rather than letting a thousand flowers bloom it seems that in the digital book space attention is more than ever weighted toward a few select hits rather than a diverse offering. Franzen’s “Freedom” has sold 35,000 copies in just two weeks. Meanwhile the Journal cites 2009 breakout novel “Woodsburner,” which won a number of awards including the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize—it has sold 351 copies to date.

In all of this the one thing that’s still not clear to me is that the cost of producing and shipping the books themselves isn’t addressed. The sale of a hardcover book may return $14 to a publisher while an e-book returns $9, but how much did it cost to print and ship that book? If it cost $5 or more, it seems the book publisher would come out ahead.

At any rate, as the Journal points out, the e-book phenomenon comes at a time when book sales overall were already slipping. “The seemingly endless self publishing choices created by the Web have eaten into the time people spend reading books,” writes the Journal.

It may be that we’re returning to a world where novelists didn’t realize fame and fortune for their work. Thankfully, that shouldn’t lead us to think the best novels are behind us—Dostoyevsky wrote some of his best work while he was destitute, as have many of fiction’s finest throughout history.