Diary of a Mad Editor

John Grisham — bestselling author of legal thrillers.

John Grisham — household name.

John Grisham — hater of eBooks, who lamented in the past that eBooks would eventually kill his golden goose.

Well, now Grisham has changed his tune somewhat with news that his publisher, Knopf-Doubleday, a division of Random House, is making his entire library of novels available as eBooks. Saying, “I’m probably going to be all right, but the aspiring writers are going to have a very hard time getting published.”

Yeah, John, guess what? It was already hard for aspiring writers to get published by the big mainstream publishers before the arrival of eBooks. The only difference now is that aspiring writers have an alternative to traditional publishing.

But, I do appreciate how far you’ve come in such a short time. Allowing your older books to be released in eBook formats is mighty big of you considering that just a year ago, you thought is would be the beginning of armageddon for the eBook market to grow. So, kudos to you, John Grisham. Maybe you can write a new thriller about your ordeal. Call it, The Publisher.

Macmillan chief, John Sargent has already demonstrated that he has no love of eBooks. But, according to statements made during a Q & A session at the Publishing Point in NYC in response to a query by blogger, Eric Hellman, Sargent is no fan of eBooks in libraries either:

"That is a very thorny problem", said Sargent. In the past, getting a book from libraries has had a tremendous amount of friction. You have to go to the library, maybe the book has been checked out and you have to come back another time. If it’s a popular book, maybe it gets lent ten times, there’s a lot of wear and tear, and the library will then put in a reorder. With ebooks, you sit on your couch in your living room and go to the library website, see if the library has it, maybe you check libraries in three other states. You get the book, read it, return it and get another, all without paying a thing. "It’s like Netflix, but you don’t pay for it. How is that a good model for us?"

"If there’s a model where the publisher gets a piece of the action every time the book is borrowed, that’s an interesting model."

Sargent’s comments are not surprising given his previous views on the subject of eBooks. (His hair looks a little thin in that picture, though. Can’t decide if its the haircut or maybe he needs to start taking vitamins for hair or something) Seriously, does Sargent even understand how libraries work? In order to borrow anything from a library, including eBooks, you must be a member of that library. You cannot access a library website 3 states away and borrow an eBook. I know at my local library, you not only need a library card, but a PIN number to access eBooks. I would imagine it’s like that at all libraries. Hellman, himself, points this out. I do think it’s quite clear at this point the Sargent is not really interested in new business models for publishing. His own words betray him.

As someone who’s often lamented that mainstream publishers seem more interested in investing their time and money in producing low-rent crap rather than quality literature, my curiosity was piqued earlier, reading Robert McCrum’s piece in The Guardian book section, "The best and worst times for publishing.

McCrumb refers to individuals such as myself as a "New Elitist" and points out, quite correctly, that lowbrow and highbrow culture has always coexisted. I don’t think anyone, including us new elitists, are really arguing that there was ever a time when this wasn’t so. What I (and those like me) are saying is that it’s become a factory-industry in which low-grade product such as the big multi-book celebrity book deals which seem to be announced daily by some industry hack are getting all of the juice while quality literature gets almost no play at all unless a previously unnoticed book catches on despite its handicaps.

What does it say about our culture when a talent like John Edgar Wideman publishes his latest short story collection through Lulu because he feels he’s being dissed by traditional publishers? We’re talking about a noted award-winning literary author. Yet, Hillary Can’t-Sing-Can’t-Act-Can’t-Write Duff can get a multi-book deal based on nothing but her manufactured celebrity.

Does it really make me an elitist to suggest that there’s a difference in how lowbrow and highbrow literature "coexisted" in the 1500s and how it coexists today? Now, I’m not going to say that what’s happening today is necessarily a bad thing for literature in the long run — I honestly don’t know what the long-term implications of current realities are, but I think it is a bad thing for traditional publishers —I’m fairly certain. If big publishing continues to pursue these kinds of book deals, how much longer can they sustain their sinking ship? How much longer before most of the Widemans are using companies like Lulu and Booksurge and Author Solutions to bring their works to market instead of dealing with corporate media types who continue to insult readers and real writers alike?

You think I’m kidding? Well, here’s one final thought: McCrumb argued in an earlier posting that the gatekeepers of traditional publishing are still necessary. The function of so-called gatekeepers is to maintain a certain level of quality in what is published. Okay, fair enough, but if they are publishing high-priced, low-quality garbage while driving away higher-quality, lower-priced writers one has to ask: Who’s watching the gate? Who are they really keeping out? What’s the value of what they are letting in? And, if they are not consistently nurturing, producing and publishing quality than what’s the value in having gatekeepers? Because you can’t have it both ways. You cannot argue that gatekeepers serve a necessary function then have it be okay for those gatekeepers to produce garbage. Because the assumption that traditional publishers are producing quality while “unmediated” sources are producing nothing but junk is not entirely accurate.

Call me crazy. Call me wrong. Call me an elitist. Just stick it in your flash drive for future reference and check that file five or ten years from now and see what’s what.