Censorship madness in Malaysia

At 11.30am, on the 29th of May, a publishing house in Petaling Jaya was raided by 20 officers of The Selangor Islamic Religious Department (Jais). 180 copies of a book by liberal Muslim Sudanese-Canadian activist Irshad Manji were seized, and the director of the publishing house Mr Ezra Zaid was arrested and then released on a RM1800.00 (USD600.00) bail with one surety over the publication of the controversial book.

Yes, it sounds like the plot from a movie by Sacha Baron Cohen, but it happened in real-time in Malaysia. During the ISA period, people lived in fear of doing or saying something wrong, or even fraternising with someone not 'approved' of, terrified of the the 2am knock on the door and the sudden removal and total disappearance (for a few days) of a loved one, and a prolonged incarceration at our equivalent of the Gulag. Now, that law has been repealed, and we can breathe (and sleep) a little easier; or at least, so we thought.

Black cloud

The book business in the country, however, has seen no such reprieve. All booksellers and publishers live in constant fear of being raided, having our books seized, and personnel detained (or worse). Any of your customers could be a Special Branch agent prowling through our aisle for contraband material, and you’d have no idea what is not allowed until he (or she) seizes it and deems it so. A daily occurrence? No. How many times have I been raided? None. How many visits have I received from the Special Branch? I have no idea. Like Sauron’s dark forces, they are formless, but everywhere. The fear is real and constant. It is like a dark cloud that permeates and poisons the air, and infects everyone who breathes. Sometimes it's so thick that one feels one can cut it with a knife. Perhaps, we have been conditioned by genetic memories, several millenniums old, of cattle raiders, invading armies and burning villages; of rapine, pillage and plunder. Then, when we hears of twenty-burly-men raiding parties, it all leaps to the surface again, because they can strike you any time, anywhere and from any direction, and they (the dark raiders) want you to know that they can. Irrational fear? Maybe. Paranoid? Hey, which country do you think we live in?

I watched on television, a BBC correspondent interviewing a well-to-do Libyan family at their home during their recent war. The journalist kept asking the mother of the children, why she was against the government when they had every material need, and all the food they wanted. Her English was not good, but I understood immediately what she was trying to say. Malaysia is not Libya. But when a twenty-man raiding party descends on one's premises, it is enough to scare the shit out of most. What the woman was trying to say was that the most important freedom, for her, was the freedom from that constant fear. I understood that.

Intimidation and harassment

Why twenty men? Wouldn't a polite phone call have been sufficient for Mr Ezra Zaid to 'surrendered' himself for questioning? Wouldn’t one or two persons have been enough to carry off 180 books?

Not in a civilised society, one would think. But it all becomes perfectly clear when one considers the intimidation factor of twenty men at your door. Intimidation is the tool of those not interested in discussions, or debate; a tool of those that is intended to demonstrate naked primal power, and its maintenance. Intimidation and harassment is also the tools of choice for those who wish to control this country by censorship.

In the case of the raid on the office of ZI Publictions, publishers of the book Allah, Kebebasan dan Cinta (Allah, Liberty and Love), it has been in the news for over a week, with the author even allowed to come into the country for the book launch on 19 May (though some of her other events were cancelled). Earlier, in 2009, Malaysia banned her book, The Trouble With Islam Today. With this in the background, one is all the more surprised at the treatment meted out to the Mr Ezra Zaid. I speak out for him, not only, as a fellow publisher and a friend, but a remark I expect to be thrown in my direction is, “Why are you so concerned; you’re not a Muslim. Stay out of Islamic affairs, or else ...”
 
Right to freedom from fear

Do Muslims have fewer rights in the country by virtue of their religion? Do they not deserve to be treated with the same human decency as everyone else; do they not deserve to expect, and receive, that polite phone call? Or, is a twenty-man raid a non-Muslim publisher just as likely? That black cloud spreads while the emperor fiddles.

Back to censorship (this is an old story): I had a shipment of Khalil Gibran books detained by the Customs at KLIA. When I tried to explain that only The Prophet by that author has been proscribed by the government and not all his titles, the officer retorted, saying of the government, “Apa dia tahu, apa PM tahu.”  (What do they know; what does the prime minister know.) There was no point in  further talk. I never saw my books again. (One officer told me that someone in the Ministry didn’t like the way some of them were written, and so they decided to seize the lot. Everyone is a critic.)

Yes, it does appear that I am willing to compromise and live with censorship. Let me assure you, that’s not true; but I’ll have that debate on another day.

First, let’s establish some civility, human decency and freedom from fear in this country.

Raman Krishnan
Publisher
Silverfish Books

Panflation: the devaluation of everything

I read this story in The Economist recently, and was quite amused. Panflation is described as a ‘virulent monster’ that is ‘dangerously out of control’ and ‘” needs to be recognised for the plague it has become’. I had to read on a little more to see where this doomsday scenario was leading.

World traveller

The first example quoted is the size of women’s dresses: ‘Estimates by The Economist suggest that the average British size 14 pair of women’s trousers is now more than four inches wider at the waist than it was in the 1970s. In other words, today’s size 14 is really what used to be labelled a size 18; a size 10 is really a size 14.’ The reason for this is obvious: marketers have decided that women feel happier buying dresses in smaller sizes. I have heard this before but I still don’t get it. They do have mirrors at home, don’t they?

Another example is super-sizing: what used to be small, medium and large, is now regular, large and very-large, which may soon give way large, very-large and humongous. (Hold your breath; it is going to happen – in some form – sooner than you think.) Then there is the ‘deluxe and luxury’ that used to be ‘standard and deluxe’; and one would no longer need to endure the ignonimity of the ‘economy class’ because some airlines are already calling it the ‘World Traveller’ class.

Six times cleverer

Then, there is the scary bit; grade inflation. The story says, ‘In Britain the proportion of A-level students given “A” grades has risen from 9% to 27% over the past 25 years. Yet other tests find that children are no cleverer than they were. A study by Durham University concluded that an A grade today is the equivalent of a C in the 1980s. In American universities almost 45% of graduates now get the top grade, compared with 15% in 1960.’

I have always wondered about that during the ‘PMR (School Leaving Certificate) exam result season’. During my time in the 60s, the best a top student could score was 8 ‘As’. Now, we have a handful of students scoring 20 ‘A’ all over the country. If these results are a fair reflection of today’s generation, the top student now is two and half times cleverer than those in the sixties, and since there are two and a half times as many in the top bracket, and the entire younger generation is more than six times cleverer than the old. Scary, right? But, walking around Bangsar, I wonder where they all are. Facebooking? Building nuclear powered rockets in their backyard? Attending Bersih rallies? Maybe, they’re all living abroad. (Utusan story for picture on the left: Seramai 4,117 atau 7.69 peratus pelajar di negeri ini berjaya memperoleh semua A -- 4117 students score As in in all subjects in the PMR exams in Johor.)

Literary super-sizing

Naturally, this brings me back to the book world. I read another story in The Daily Beast, ‘Are Books Becoming Too Long to Read?’ Says Marc Wortman, ‘We read books by the word. But lately publishers seem to sell them by the pound. For a book to win recognition as BIG these days, it must be weighty.’

So, is there a case for literary supersizing?

Certainly, we have had customers who value books by the kilo (perhaps keeping future resale value to the paper-lama man in mind). ‘Aiyoh, why the book so expensive, one. So few pages only, what?’ That's not an uncommon reaction. Parent’s balk the most when buying books for their children. “Before we go home, she already finish reading in the car, lor.” So they make their children read the same book fifteen times, and then they fight.

Incarnation

Still, I don’t get Marc Wortman’s beef. Are big books only a modern phenomenon? War and Peace comes to mind, and so does Crime and Punishment; and Gone with the Wind. And  A Suitable Boy. Methinks  Mr Wortman has forgotten (though I agree with his view of the Steve Jobs book by Isaacson which could have easily been halved: what a waste of paper).

In the seventies, I don’t recall Catch 22 by Joseph Heller being a small book, nor Alex Haley’s Roots. The eighties had John Fowles and John Irving who both didn’t write too many small books. In the seventies and eighties, big books were ‘in’ if one wanted to look erudite, or impress chicks. So, nothing much has changed. I now balk at big books for a different reason: not enough time left in this incarnation, lor.

New way to impress friends

If there was supersizing in the book world (note the past tense) it was in the mega store business. Whatever the chains may say, blaming the e-book for their woes, the collapse of the mega bookstore was due to poor business plans: too many large bookshops (sometimes on the same street), renting very  expensive real estate, and undercutting one another on prices, particularly of best sellers (where the meat is).

Big books will always be around; but with the advent of the e-reader, they may no longer be necessary to impress friends.

Mommy porn on the Kindle

When I first read a report that said paperback sales were down by 25% year to year, but hardback sales were holding its own, I was surprised. I thought, it would be the other way round because e-books do cost substantially less than first editions, but not the cheaper paperbacks. Then I read another story, Ebooks are rekindling women's x rated reading, it all began to make sense. The Kindle is the perfect device for consuming pornographic media, especially 'mommy porn'!

I am surprised I didn’t see it earlier, although I did have a nagging feeling of a piece missing from the logic puzzle, somewhere. How could I not have seen it? Porn has always driven technology. Let’s go back to the VCD and VHS craze from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. The explosion in the sales of these devices was mind-blowing. Was there really that much media to consume, even taking into account the addictive Hong Kong soaps. One day (I was living in Puchong at the time) a neighbour invited my wife and me for drinks because we were new there. Maybe, there was little to talk about after the niceties were over; maybe, it was because the men and the women were having different conversations; maybe he thought, since I am a man, I was constantly horny, he decided to show me his collection of video tapes. He had about thirty of them and every one was porn, with nothing left to the imagination in the cover art. Being neighbourly and all, he offered to let me borrow them. I declined, saying that I didn’t have a VHS player, a declaration that had him gaping at me in disbelief. He offered to let us watch it on his player in his house, to which I said, “Yes ... maybe ... one day,” but never brought that subject up again.

Bad press

Porn has always had a bad press, but if one dares to look at it objectively, it has been the game changer, the killer app, in more industries then we care to admit. Almost overnight, the VCD/VHS phenomena facilitated the consumption of porn in the privacy of living rooms (and bedrooms). I’m not going to be judgemental about this, but some disturbing stories did emerge: a close friend, who used to send her son to a baby-sitter in our neighbourhood, was shocked to find him watching porn with the family in the living room of their house when she went to pick him up early one day, unannounced. (We used to wonder where he learnt some of his more colourful vocabulary -- he was in kindergarten --  though we tried not to make too much of it.)

Next, came the DVD revolution; porn in high definition -- don’t even try to visualise it, or you will be struck down by a thunderbolt. One only had to ask the sales staff of the electrical appliance stores which brand and which model was good for pirated media and, in particular, porn. (There was one major international brand – no names mentioned here – that insisted on being ‘kosher’, but found its market share dropping so fast that it quickly released a jail-broken model for the local and regional markets.)

The next major game changer was the internet browser, Netscape. “Wah! Fantastic man; just type ‘xxx’ and you can watch all the porn you want,” drooled a colleague. I dare say I was one of the early adopters of the computer – from the IBM 1130 in the university, to the LSI desktop at work and the Apple 11e at home. But I was so far behind the loop on this one: the entire office was talking about porn on the net, and I was still fiddling about with spread sheets.

Mommy porn

Then, Amazon.com became a favourite place to buy porn magazines -- Playboy, Hustler, you name it -- and have it delivered to your home discretely wrapped in brown paper, eliminating the risk of being spotted procuring them from magazine stands at railway stations like a perv.  Next stop: Android, of which Steve Jobs famously said, “Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.” Guess what? They did. But with Apple keeping porn off the iPhone, it's a win-win situation : buy your kids iPhones and iPads for Christmas, and get yourself an Android for private use.

And now, it’s Kindle time! When Silverfish first opened shop, a major distributor, who deals primarily in best-sellers, brought us a box of then popular romance novels to choose from, but we declined for fear of being hammered by our customers because there were too many visuals of bursting bustiers on the covers. Now, if you are a Jackie-O look-alike, sitting at the lobby of a five-star hotel, in your leopard-skin pillbox hat, reading from a Kindle while waiting for your appointment, and he walks in in his business suit, what’s going to be his first comment? About what you are reading, or about your Kindle? Would he care if you are reading Dostoevsky or mommy porn? Okay, fast forward three years later: still same coffee shop, still same hat, the novelty has worn off, and you are reading the latest collection of essays by Milan Kundera. Would prefer to  read that in public on a Kindle, or a ‘book’ book? One thinks, you would rather be caught holding the latter, a hardback if possible for, now (as before), it’s about bragging rights. Second, you don't want anyone to assume you are reading ‘mommy porn’.

Evolution

Men would be in the same boat too, of course, but one suspects our nether regions are more readily titillated by visual imagery than by prose. That would probably explain why, while the earlier tech revolutions were led by men, this one, with the e-book, will be dictated by women.

Blame it on evolution.

Indie survival guide in the post tsunami book world

(for authors, publishers and retailers)

Small guys are zilch

I read a story some years ago in Time magazine, about why big businesses are better than small ones. There was a story of a Japanese convenient store business in a small town where the owner knew all her customer; chats with them for a while and serves them tea before they depart with some groceries. Moral of the story: it is nice customer experience, but inefficient. Imagine the number of burgers McDonald's would have flipped within that half hour! I read another similar story in the Economist recently. The bottom line: economics is important, culture is not (except for tourists -- and that's economics). And small inefficient businesses, no matter how much cultural cache they hold, have no business existing.

Biodiversity

I am no economist, but I'm a believer in biodiversity. Don't put all your eggs (not that kind, you filthy mind) in one basket, every child is taught. Wrong advice? When a big guy (like Borders) goes down, the entire industry is shaken up. Books are returned, remainder-book dealers are overstocked, retailers dealing in them have a great time and, consequently, more major stores wobble. It's happening in Malaysia; just ask anyone in the industry. If a few small guys go under, they'd be replaced by others with hardly a ripple. The new bogeyman in that universe is the e-book. A major chain in the city that halved the size of its largest outlet recently and moved one floor down, gave the e-book excuse in a newspaper story. Please, who are you kidding? You had a bad business plan, one that could only succeed with a backer with infinitely deep pockets.

A lecturer in my engineering school would say, "When in doubt, go back to first principles." The era of the major book store is over. It was an aberration to begin -- huge floor spaces in expensive down-town malls, selling low margin bestsellers at crazy discounts (ostensibly for market share) was a doomed strategy from the start. That formula didn't last a decade. So, now, we have to get back to basics.

Vermin survive holocausts

Books are culture. Bookselling is part of that culture. As much as the Harvard types want to reduce it to a commodity, the only hope for the book (dead-tree or digital) lies with the indies, the small guys -- authors, publishers and retailers. Particularly, in the last two decades, authors have been blinded by the dazzle of that big fat advance. I read in the newspapers recently that the chances of winning a certain American lottery is one in 176 million. About the same for authors who want to get on the international bestsellers' list, maybe less. Many Asian authors who publish in UK and the US, disappear after the second book, if that. The reality is grim, but that does not mean authors need to despair. Few authors can be all things to everybody. (It is not a surprise that there is only one JK Rowling in the entire population of the world.)

How is the book going to survive, then? By going small. Authors, keep your day jobs and become the champion of your town, your province, your country, your part of the world, in your genre. Enrich your community, your culture; you will be remembered for a hundred years because nobody worships  heroes like small towns. With e-books, your work can still be made available worldwide at a relatively low cost. Let Amazon work for you, not you for them. However, treat any income from that source as a bonus. Your gravy will come from those who live with you, who identify with your writing. Do the local circuits; it costs a lot less. Visit schools, colleges, universities, libraries, clubs, and give talks at indie book stores, rotary meetings, at any place that will have you. Do your social thing. You have to push your book yourself. The publisher who helped you get it out there is probably too poor to do much. Publishers, promote your local writers; forget about the big hitters unless you specialise in translations. Be disciplined, stay focussed on your niche and be the best that you can be. Don't let the temptation of riches lead you astray. Enjoy what you do. Publish different formats. Have multiple revenue streams. Go into retail. Get thrilled when someone from across the globe recognises what you do. Retailers, what is there to say? I have never felt more impersonal than in a chain store; I have never felt impersonal at an indie. Indie retailer, ever thought of going into publishing? Become the Shakespeare & Co of your town. Do your thing. Host your town authors; be the nerve centre of your town.

Little guys are like vermin. And, like cockroaches, we will survive a nuclear holocaust. Hundreds of small indie publishers and retailers were trampled on and destroyed by the behemoths in the first decade of the new millennium. Now that the invaders have left, or self-destruct, it's time for us to rise again. (Sounds like a sci-fi movie; War of the Worlds? Listen to the soundtrack!)

It's the product, stupid

And, indie authors, publishers and retailers, embrace technology, technology, technology. You know the best part? There is so much free stuff on the internet, its crazy. Beware some bloodsuckers offering 'free' software; they can be damned sneaky. But most are genuinely good people. Search for 'open source'. These are the angels. (I still haven't found a good free alternative for inDesign and Illustrator, though.) Visit the Silverfish Books website that has been entirely built for free (not counting sweat and tears). A CEO of a major chain recently boasted that he spent a million ringgit on their on-line store. I remained quiet. I paid zilch. But then, one can only do the free stuff if you are small and don't have a Board of Directors hovering. If there is one thing I have learnt, it's that the PC and the web are the great levellers, a boon to all indies, no matter what trade you are in. In particular, they have brought  down the cost of entry into the book industry. Silverfish Books would not have been possible without the computer and the internet. Be careful; let technology work for you, not the other way round. Go at it with a vengeance.

As Steve Jobs would have said, "It's the product, stupid!"