A year that was

No, I am not going to write about what an absolute annus horribilis the year two-thousand and eight was, enough people are doing that. I am going to confine myself to book matters, though some of the former could creep in.

2008 was a year with no Harry Potter circus; that has run its course. So, there was really no big book to carry the year and give the book industry an artificial high. In fact there were hardly any big books at all, except for Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, which I thought was one of the best books he has written in a long time, surely one of his most readable. Yes, some will quibble that it does not have the stature of his Midnight's Children (that was more than a quarter of a century ago, please move on). Some will complain about the way he is liberal with historical truths. So was Homer. It is a good story, a fun read.

As for Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, my current plans are to give it a miss -- "the story of two Indias" is such a cliche. Why are Indian writers (apart from Naipaul and Rushdie) not allowed to simply tell a story? But, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies is still on my list. I am not interested in the rest. It was a pretty slow year for fiction. I am waiting for some translated works of Le Clezio to come out. Meanwhile, I will catch up on the classics.

In other international news, we all know about Borders selling off their stores in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. In UK we have just heard that Euler Hermes has withdrawn credit insurance to their suppliers, which could mean that they will have to pay cash upfront for their merchandise. It appears they are a bit shaky in the US too.

In another story, Bertrams, one of the bigger book wholesalers in the UK, is up for sale after the demise of their parent company, Woolworth. Expect a major shake-up in the book industry next year. But Amazon.com did well over Christmas.

An industry shake-up is surely on the cards now. The book had been commoditised to absurdity, mass market merchants only understands what turns over or, in the bookseller language, "sells through". Books could be beans for all they cared. Perhaps now the real bookshops (indies or otherwise) will return to the fore, and publishers will focus on real books. 

Shelf Awarness puts it succinctly: "Now may be a good time to get back to basics and do business together again if we all want to survive. Mass merchants will likely cut back on book sections at the first signs of under performance ... (but) Bookstores will stay the course. As the restructuring goes forward, we can only hope that publishers will return to their roots and work with booksellers to enhance backlist opportunities and develop new authors."

Which is what we at Silverfish Books have been doing most of 2008: developing new authors. There was no Silverfish New Writing 8. That felt kind of strange, but also a relief. It was fun while it lasted. We decided to stop it when it became a chore. So in 2008 we published three books by individual authors: Tales from the Court by Matthew Thomas (who, ironically, is the only Malaysian writer to 'graduate' from the New Writing series to produce a whole book of un-recycled material), Poems Sacred and Profane by Salleh ben Joned (a reprint of a collectible classic) and Ripples and other stories by Shih-Li Kow, who simply keeps going from strength to strength. We were putting the final touches to her work end of last month when we received an invitation to submit an entry for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the South East Asia and South Pacific region. We thought, if any current Malaysian writer deserves the nomination it is Shih-Li Kow. We have sent off her entry but we hope they will receive it on time considering the year-end holiday season. We are keeping our fingers crossed for her.

It has been a very memorable year.

Happy New Year, 2009.

Dancing on the deck of the Titanic

(Mexican author, Alberto Ruy Sanchez,  told me about an essay he wrote in defence of books titled, The Book is not a Shoe, over lunch some weeks ago, so it is with sincere appreciation to him that I write this.)

So Woolworth has gone bankrupt and Betrams Books, which it owns but is not under administration, is up for sale. I am sure that is not news anymore. The latest news to emerge from the publishing industry is that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) has reported that the book sales for the month of October decreased by 20.1 percent at US$644.5 million and were down by 3.4 percent for the year. 20.1%!? That is almost a disaster considering the incredibly low margins the industry works on. One dares not even think of the December season.

Like Sara Nelson of the Publishers Weekly, many have stopped reading their investment statements and even the business pages of their newspapers or listen to the news on television. It is far too relentlessly gloomy. Sara Nelson writes,"We all knew that publishing would not be spared; that feeling was palpable as early as last summer and certainly by Frankfurt -- when, if one more person compared going to the lavish Bertelsmann party to "dancing on the deck of the Titanic," I would have thrown him in the punch bowl. Still, while the news this week of massive layoffs and downsizing at Random House, Simon & Schuster, Thomas Nelson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was not surprising, it was, like any expected death, still a shock." Yes, there is no reason the publishing industry should be spared. It has been behaving as badly as the rest. Hence, the rub.

The book is a book, not a shoe. Real book people have been saying this for years. But with dollar signs dancing before their eyes everyone -- from contruction magnates to timber tycoons -- jumped into it. Hundreds of corporations with no idea what a book is, employed thousands who had never read one in their entire lives to run mega stores with hundreds of thousands of titles. From reports, Britain publishes close to 200,000 new titles a year, out of which 3000 make it to the main stores, with a handful remaining there for more than three months. What kind of industry is that? If any of the other industries worked on those numbers they would be closed by now.

A book is not a shoe, too, in many European countires which are strong about their heritage and culture thing. The last country to decide that a book was indeed a shoe was Switzerland, that despite valiant efforts by many to protect books as "cultural goods". In France, not too long ago, where retail book discounting is illegal, Amazon.com, which introduced free shipping, was convicted and made to pay a penalty when the booksellers association succesfully argued that 'free shipping' was indeed a discount.

In a recent International Market Comparisons: A Benchmark Study of Profitability by the Booksellers Association of the United Kingdom and Ireland (BA), comparing the market in the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, and the USA with the UK, the key findings were that the total UK market growth was one of the lowest, and the use of promotions and discounts created a 'vicious circle'. This despite the UK having a higher per capita book purchase than all markets except the US. In the Netherlands books cannot be sold at a discount until a year after release.

It could be (and has been) argued that the current problems in Britain arose with the demise of the national Net Book Agreement (NBA). The NBA was a British price-fixing agreement between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public that came into effect on January 1, 1900. Any bookseller who sold a book for less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher. (Remember the time when we used to pay much lower fixed prices for our books in Malaysia?) The NBA enabled publishers to subsidise the works of important but less widely-read authors using money from bestsellers.

In August 1994 the Director General of the Office of Fair Trading decided that the Restrictive Practices Court should review the agreement. In March 1997 it was ruled that the Net Book Agreement was against public interest and was ruled illegal. So, what had been in place for a hundred years was dismantled only ten years ago, with nothing to replace it. The result has been chaos, ever since.

And the result? Bookstore chains benefitted. They were large enough to demand massive (and unreasonable) discounts, which the publishers provided by increasing the recommended retail price (RRP) of their books. The public bought bestsellers at reduced prices, but had to pay much more for other excellent books that were less popular. Buyers in smaller countries, without the benefit of volume, ended up paying more for their books. (This is made worse by the 'exclusive rights' agreeements signed between publishers and local distributors, but that is another story.) Large supermarket chains got into the business, mainly offering a limited number of best-selling titles at hugely discounted prices. After one hundred years of holding out as a 'cultural good' the book was finally reduced to a shoe, a throw-away consumer product alongside Kleenex and wipes for babies' bottoms. Many small independent bookshops were severely affected. Borders burst forth into high streets all over the world. (Their demise last year was probably the first sign that all was not well in the book-world.)

In Malaysia we continue to dance on the deck of the Titanic. How else does one explain the number of mega-bookstores in the Klang Valley, more than twice the number -- and retail area -- than in the whole of Singapore?

A matter of religion

(A censored version of this story appeared in the Malay Mail on Thursday, 27th of  November. Don't ask.)

Macintosh users have always lamented the fact that many software developers routinely release Windows versions of their programmes before they write one for  their systems. Case in point, they are still waiting for a Mac version of Chrome, Google's latest browser. This is, naturally, understandable from the point of view of market forces. Latest survey suggest that the Mac has crept up to a 9.5% market share in the US, but much lower worldwide.

But now www.webmonkey.com, a web developer's resource owned by Wired Digital, laments that no one even wants to write a decent virus for the Mac platform on par with the millions that threaten Windows users daily. According to the blogspot, the latest attempt at creating a virus for the Mac, a trojan, is so lame that the user had to be incredibly stupid for it to work at all. Basically, the computer user will have to visit, what else, a porn site, download a video codec, open it, mount the disk image, and launch the application, which will then proceed to create a 'backdoor' for other malicious ware.

There was a story making the rounds on the internet a few years ago. (This story has been ascribed to several major computer companies, but I am sure they are apocryphal. But it is a good story).

A man contacted customer support saying that he was having trouble with his new computer. So they both went through an 'idiot's' check-list to eliminate the most commonly occurring problems – have you connected this cable to that, have you installed all the components and so on. After a long and arduous process, the customer insisted that there was still no sign of 'life' on the monitor. Finally there was only one thing left: the support guy asked the customer to check if the computer had been plugged in and switched on. The customer said that he was leaning over to see but was having difficulty spotting it because it was quite dark and there was light coming in from only one window in the room. The rest of the conversation apparently went like this:

"Well, turn on the office light then."

"I can't."

"No? Why not?"

"Because there's a power failure."

"A power... A power failure? Aha, Okay, we've got it licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?"

"Well, yes, I keep them in the closet."

"Good. Go get them, unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store you bought it from."

"Really? Is it that bad?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it is."

"Well, all right then, I suppose. What do I tell them?"

"Tell them you're too f***** stupid to own a computer." (Type this last sentence onto your browser and you can read the whole story online.)

The computer model is not mentioned, but when it comes to stupidity it does not matter which. The Mac versus PC argument is almost a matter of religion. You have to listen to these guys go at one another. Neither side will concede an inch when debating the superiority of their favourite machines, and operating systems.

I am often caught in the middle for I have used both machines, on a daily basis, for over twenty years. I use Macs at home and PCs in the office, and I don't feel I have betrayed any religious ideal. It's like owning a relatively expensive, moderately luxurious sedan for home and leisure use, and a cheaper, hardy pick-up or four-wheel-drive at work. What's wrong with that? My religious beliefs lean, decidedly, towards the Mac, I will admit, but that does not mean I should not acknowledge the superiority of PC for certain tasks, just like that of a utility vehicle over dirt tracks or on construction sites. Yes, PCs have viruses (millions of them), they leak memory, their hard disks get fragmented and they can be a pain, but they cost less and some programmes will not run on Macs.

So what can I say to those whose Mac religion forbids them from using PCs or vice versa? Sorry, that's your loss.