With the launch of the Apple iPad — and its iBookstore — just two weeks away, “strong initial pre-orders for the iPad (along with its sexy television advertisement) make it possible that Apple could meet or exceed the number of Kindles in the marketplace in short order,” observes Michael Cader in this report (subscription required) for Publishers Marketplace. And as you can guess, that’s bringing out the best in Amazon.com.

Yep, you guessed it: Amazon is once again issuing threats to remove buy buttons from publishers who don’t play ball. According to Cader:

At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically by Amazon in a recent phone call initiated by the etailer that Amazon would not negotiate agency selling terms with any other publishers outside of the five initial Apple partners. This publisher was told that if they switched to an agency model for ebooks, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in print and digital form. In conversation, Amazon is said to have reiterated that as matter of policy they are declining to negotiate an agency model with any publisher outside of the five who have already announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore.

In a stirring development, however, it seems independent publishers may try to stand against Amazon the way most of the Big Six publishers did:

In other conversations, executives who did not want to speak for attribution indicated an inclination to move forward with Apple and stand firm on any resistance from other customers–along with a hope that they wouldn’t be standing alone in taking such a position. Though publishers traditionally do not discuss such matters with each other out of legal concerns, the publisher receiving the direct threat cited above is exploring with counsel the extent to which they might be able to consult with other independent publishers facing a similar choice.

Of course, Amazon didn’t like the fact that most of big publishing stood up against them, and in a surprising note Cader reports that …

… ongoing negotiations between Amazon and the outstanding Agency Four (Hachette, Harper, Penguin and Simon & Schuster) remain unresolved for now. If you thought the discussion over the resetting of terms was over and done with after Amazon admitted that “ultimately” they would “have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms,” then think again.

At the time, Amazon told customers “Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.” But now, according to those who have been briefed on the negotiations, Amazon continues to use the threat of removing buy buttons from publishers’ physical and digital books.

The indications are that if the Agency Four have not finalized new digital sales agreements with Amazon prior to the launch of Apple’s iPad, they could face delisting from direct sale at Amazon, as Macmillan did.

And as if Apple wasn’t making Amazon feel cornered/crazed enough, there’s also this to consider, says Cader: “Google is on the horizon and continues to take a flexible position in discussing an agency model for the forthcoming Google Editions, publishers say.”

Gerald Posner

Now it can be told: Bestselling author Gerald Posner stepped down from his position last month as “chief investigative reporter” of The Daily Beast after a Jack Shafer report for Slate accused him of plagiarizing stories from the Miami Herald about a Mob trial in Miami. As Shafer noted, Posner

… didn’t make any excuses, either. And he made no effort to escape the P-word, which writers caught stealing copy usually do.

Stating that he was “horrified” at what he did, Posner agreed that it constitutes plagiarism. But he couldn’t figure out how he did it.

He said he had no memory of having seen the Herald story, describing himself as “absolutely sure” he did not see it before sending his own story to Beast editors. But that memory must be wrong, he said, because the similarities between the two pieces are too great, and the Herald’s story was posted before he e-mailed his to his editors at 2:03 a.m. on Feb. 2.

“I must have had the Miami Herald there and copied.” He regards the subtle differences between his copy and the Herald’s as evidence of him “doing the rewrite” of what he thought was his copy.

Now, in an Associated Press wire story by Hillel Italie, Posner — author of the acclaimed book Case Closed, on the Kennedy assasination — admits just as bluntly to further plagiarism in his newest book, Miami Babylon, about the history of mob activity in Miami.

According to Italie,

Posner said he scanned many documents and books he used for “Babylon,” including from “Clubland,” into a computer database instead of working with the documents all in front of him, as he had done in previous books. Since the book took years to write, he said he should have marked the passages from other sources much better, so that when he went back to work on the chapters, he would be certain which were his words and which were others.

Some of the passages are similar but not identical because he edited them, he said.

As Posner himself says, “If you use something from another book, a statement from another book, it needs to be in quotations, or if you take something and put it in your own syntax and grammar, you still need to cite it.” He also tells Italie, “There is no worse word than the ‘p’ word — plagiarism …. It conjures up the worst elements of the business.”

A statement from the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, says, “We are reviewing the situation and discussing the issues with the author.”

Bob Miller and the original crew at HarperStudio

And so, after less than two years in office, Bob Miller exits the stage of big time New York publishing, to the shock of the media that covered him like he was, well, news. He got huge coverage as a revolutionary when he started HarperStudio, from lots of trade hacks who should have known better — hacks who called people like me (see this garbled mistake on my part) to couch their vague suspicions that Miller was essentially ripping off the hard-earned innovations of indies, which of course he was.

His departure didn’t even bring that shallow level of scrutiny.

He’s quoted, instead, in this Publishers Weekly report and elsewhere, as saying that he was “very proud of what we have accomplished at HarperStudio.” But of course, he doesn’t say what that was.

Well, don’t hold your breath for the exit interview that asks him about his undelivered-upon claims that he was going to end returns and otherwise change the book biz. It seems a safe assumption, too, that no one is going to ask him about how difficult it must have been to have to offer writers only six figure advances — because he’d sworn to lower advances — after having built a career at Hyperion on winning ridculous auctions. And it seems most certain of all that no one’s going to observe he must have left Harper because he either saw a cut coming — because HarperStudio just wasn’t working? — or because he sold out to go to a smaller operation for a ton of cash … or both?

Leave it to Gawker, lonely Gawker, to report with suitable irony on the likelihood of a conglomerate ever sticking with such an effort beyond the desertion of its huckster front.

The only thing that otherwise seemed accurate in press reports this time was that, for once, those of us in the indie realm saw in Miller’s breathless quotes none of our ideas being ripped off — after all, there’s nothing innovative about selling out your principles for a wad of money.

The road to the Red Carpet is never smooth. But now you can follow along, here, from the comfort of your own home, as filmaker/librarian Kacper Jarecki makes his first movie. The film is based on Melville House author Tao Lin’s first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee.

See Kacper in his freshly rented film studio/apartment! Cheer along as he recruits his co-workers to star! Wonder at his boundless enthusiasm! And laugh, at the pitch perfect movie poster he’s cooked up!

Meanwhile, Tao Lin has also had his novella, Shoplifting From American Apparel (Melville House) optioned by Sangha Films, makers of The Human War, based on the book by Noah Cicero.

Could a Roman Polanski version of Lin’s up-coming novel, Richard Yates, about a love affair with an underaged girl, be far behind?

David Beckham

The British Poet Laureate, Carole Ann Duffy, has penned a new poem for her job — “Achilles,” about the Achilles heel injury suffered by soccer star David Beckham.

According to a Telegraph report by Nick Collins, in the poem, “tributes to Beckham’s ability with a football are mixed with references to the classical myth in which the warrior is let down by his one weakness – his heel – while fighting at Troy.”

Explains Duffy, Beckham “is almost a mythical figure himself, in popular culture. The most tragic image was him being unable to walk and crying on the side of the pitch.”

As the poem puts it, in part:

… when Odysseus came, with an
athlete’s build, a sword and a shield,
he followed him to the battlefield,
the crowd’s roar,

And it was sport, not war,
his charmed foot on the ball …

But then his heel, his heel, his heel …

For a long time I’ve been wondering how the romantic myth of book publishing has persisted, especially with the “death of publishing” chant persistently penetrating the ever-darkening atmosphere surrounding “old-fashioned” and “traditional” books. This isn’t advertising, with exec Don Draper popping up on AMC every week. Or magazine publishing, with the scary yet mesmerizing Meryl Streep commanding the entire fashion world from her editor-in-chief high horse. Or, best yet, CSI or the NYPD or LAPD or whatever crime department is currently a la mode on cable.  This is book publishing!  Not only is it not glamorous, but we’re all nerds! (Come on, admit it–even under our super cute and professional NYC exterior.)  So why does the entire world think that we still have 2-martini lunches and throw lavish book parties overflowing with champagne and caviar?

Last night, it became clear to me.

I watched “The Proposal.”

(Yes, that movie.  It was streaming on Netflix.)

And THIS explains it:

Damn you Sandra Bullock!

Enough said.

We told you earlier about a coalition of Amazon reviewers attacking books that have no Kindle edition. Well, here’s another case, and evidence that their campaign continues: Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, currently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon, has no U.S. Kindle edition and, as of this writing, has been tarred with twenty-nine one star reviews, all but one of which is actually a complaint about the lack of a Kindle edition.

One customer, Dr. Jose Lopez, writes “we should all as consumers start a movement to boycott publishers who try to bully us into buying hard cover or any books.” Another, Tulsa’s mollybo: “I have some physical limitations that make it difficult to hold a physical book, so I’ve read eBooks for the last two years. Unfortunately, the publisher is keeping me from reading this one. I’m sure by the time they get around to publishing an electronic version something else will have caught my attention. Oh well, another lost sale, and another one-star review.”

Macmillan made headlines at the end of last month with the announcement of their new DynamicBooks electronic textbook system.  DynamicBooks allows professors to customize Macmillan’s existing digital textbooks by adding chapters and class syllabi, embedding audio and video, and even rewriting passages.  All of the changes and additions to the books are clearly marked within, and so far there hasn’t been much of an outcry about the possibilities of content modification that the system enables.  Of course, the intent of DynamicBooks isn’t to change curricula, but rather to restructure the traditional textbook business model, which has suffered in recent years due to the digital revolution and the proliferation of online used-textbook stores.

But Macmillan and other companies seem, in this case, to be a bit short-sighted.  While the introduction of DynamicBooks might be beneficial for colleges and universities (which set their own curricula), what happens when it is introduced into public school systems, which follow state-mandated curricula?

This past Friday, the Texas Board of Education concluded the most recent battle in an ideological struggle over the nature of the state’s social studies curriculum.  Every decade, curriculum standards of the state are reviewed and voted upon.  The vote is an essential one, because all textbooks that are used in the public education system must be approved by the board in accordance with those standards.  If digital textbooks down the road are to be adopted by the Board of Education, and these textbooks are able to be modified on a school-by-school, teacher-by-teacher basis, their use essentially nullifies the democratic voice of the school board (whether or not you agree with their ideological positions).  This problem is then multiplied across the many states that use a similar curriculum voting system.

Now in Texas last week, the curriculum vote may have lead to an unwanted end, as a large conservative voting bloc enabled the teaching of creationism and the exclusion of many non-white historical figures from history textbooks.  But, as much as I might disagree with the result, I do agree with the process: the decision was arrived at democratically (and now, thank god, the entire state has 30 days on which to comment on the new standards).  It is a participatory process on a grand scale in which parents, teachers, educational professionals and others are invited to participate.  With individual textbooks, teachers and the DynamicBooks model, that process would be removed.

I’m not saying that there is potential for digital adoption by boards of education to happen any time soon.  The costs are too great for public schools, the political barriers too high–for now.  But DynamicBooks is setting something in motion by creating opportunities to amend completed text and “correct” other authors’ work, opportunities for censorship of and insertion of subjective opinion into objective, researched and edited work.  Maybe before changing traditional business models, major publishers should look at the potential their new models will have at changing traditional education models.  And the consequences that could have for the future of our education system, and in turn, our country.

NY Times Notable Book of the Year, and Melville House translation.

Dennis Johnson, co-publisher at Melville House, tells all in this interview with Biblioklept’s Ed Turner. Johnson answers the ‘klep’ts questions about some of the thornier issues in publishing — such as, How to publish translated books, and how to make them work. Where do publishers get their ideas for books? And how is it that people still love to read the classics? And, oh yeah: Did you ever steal a book?