I’ll reprint [about half of] the email I just got this morning:
********************************************************* WELCOME TO THETOPSHELFSWEDISHINVASION!
*********************************************************
www.topshelfcomix.com/swedish-invasion
Välkommen!
Okay, so our mastery of the Swedish language stops there.
But we’ve got to say how excited we are to welcome you to THESWEDISHINVASION, our overall title for a whole host of
amazing Swedish stuff coming to you from Top Shelf this spring.
By April, we’ll have seven whole books showcasing the best of
this hotbed of comics talent, including four full-length
graphic novels, two incredible anthologies, and one full-color
reference book by one of Sweden’s top comic scholars! It’s a
veritable smörgåsbord of comics!
At New York’s MoCCA Festival and Chicago’s new C2E2 Convention,
we’ll bring along a whole host of the Swedish cartoonists who
created these awesome books, and throw, not one, but two (!)
killer parties to welcome them to the States in style. We hope
you can join us in the celebration.
The comics scene in Sweden is a real treasure trove that has
gone virtually unnoticed in our part of the world… but now
we’ll all have a chance to get to know these creators and
fall in love with their books. Take a look at the information
below, and let the invasion begin!
FRIDAY, APRIL 9TH, 8:00PM PARTY at ROCKETSHIPCOMICS
— 208 Smith Street, Brooklyn, New York, Phone: 718-797-1348
— Come meet and party with Mats Jonsson (HEYPRINCESS), Simon
Gardenfors (THE 120 DAYS OF SIMON), Kolbeinn Karlsson
(THETROLLKING), Niklas Asker (SECONDTHOUGHTS), Fredrik
Strömberg (SWEDISHCOMICSHISTORY), Johannes Klenell (Editor
of NORTHERNLIGHTS), and NORTHERNLIGHTS contributors Sofia
Olsson, Sara Granér, Benjamin Stengard, Asa Grennvall, and
Emelie Ostergren; as well as Chris Staros, Brett Warnock,
and Leigh Walton of the Top Shelf crew. Food and cash bar
will be provided by the Clover Club private room
(attached to Rocketship).
SATURDAY & SUNDAY, APRIL 10TH-11TH, MoCCA ARTSFESTIVAL
@ THE 69TH REGIMENTARMORY
— 68 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York (Between 25th & 26th)
— Hang out with us at the Top Shelf tables where the whole
gang will be signing books all weekend.
— Also appearing: Nate Powell, James Kochalka, & Alex Robinson!
*************** CHICAGO
***************
SATURDAY, APRIL 17TH, 8:00PM PARTY at the renowned DOUBLEDOOR
— 1572 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, Phone: 773-489-3160
— Tickets on sale www.doubledoor.com, $10/$8 with C2E2 pass,
Doors 8 p.m. Show @ 9 p.m.
— Come meet and party with Mats Jonsson (HEYPRINCESS),
Simon Gardenfors (THE 120 DAYS OF SIMON), Kolbeinn Karlsson
(THETROLLKING), and Chris Staros (TOPSHELF), as Top Shelf
co-sponsors the official C2E2 After Party with the Nerd City
crew. It’ll be a music and event-filled night, featuring sets
by DJ Ghengis Won, Major Taylor, burlesque troupe The Flaming
Dames, and headlining band The Jai Alai Savant (fresh off
their recent show with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists).
Simon Gardenfors — a well-known Swedish rapper as well —
will also be featured in a special performance.
FRIDAYTHRUSUNDAY, APRIL 16TH-18TH, C2E2
(CHICAGOCOMICANDENTERTAINMENTEXPO)
— McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive, Downtown Chicago
— Hang out with us at the Top Shelf, Nerd City, and Chicago
Comics booths, where the Swedish crew will be signing books
all weekend long.
— Also appearing: Jeffrey Brown, with his new UNDELETEDSCENES!
******************************************************* PREORDERTHESWEDISHINVASIONBOOKS
IN THECURRENTDIAMONDPREVIEWS!
*******************************************************
The current Diamond Previews catalog has all SEVEN of the
Swedish Invasion titles — 5 all-new, plus 2 classics —
available for pre-ordering right now. SEVEN all-too-human
stories, finally available to an English-speaking audience.
I’ll cut it off there; if you want to read the blurbs and see the previews, you should check out the Swedish Invasion link. Hopefully, a full press release will post sometime soon to either Top Shelf’s Home Page or it’s news page.
I have a lot of ways to sort and arrange the data that go into the charts, but only a limited amount of time each week. I’m trying to gauge public interest in the various features by allowing you, Dear Reader, to pick your favourites.
Poll Question: Is the Spotlight feature, as presented below, of value to you? Vote by leaving a comment. Please Note: Since I usually receive no comments on blog posts, any one person with an opinion could end up being the deciding vote on how I report this data.
Andrews McMeel is the book publishing arm for the Universal Press Syndicate (in fact both are owned by Andrews McMeel Publ., LLC) and in addition to Calvin & Hobbes, Doonesbury, The Boondocks (up until 2006) and The Far Side, they also publish books & calendars based on strips owned by other syndicates (notably Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, and some but not all of the New Yorker cartoon collections)
164. ↓-2 (162) : Calvin & Hobbes Complete – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2005 [276.4] :: 166. ↑26 (192) : Dilbert 2010 Wall Calendar – Andrews McMeel, Jul 2009 [273.2] :: 293. ↓-73 (220) : Far Side Complete – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2003 [195.2] :: 301. ↓-18 (283) : Dilbert 2010 Day-to-Day Calendar – Andrews McMeel, Jul 2009 [191.7] :: 313. ↓-81 (232) : Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2008 [187.3] :: 320. ↓-76 (244) : Peanuts Celebrating Peanuts: 60 Years – Andrews McMeel, Nov 2009 [183.4] :: 323. ↓-22 (301) : Mutts The Gift of Nothing – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2005 [182.6] :: 335. ↓-50 (285) : Calvin & Hobbes Scientific Progress Goes Boink – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1991 [177.6] :: 355. ↓-49 (306) : Dilbert 14 Years of Loyal Service in a Fabric-Covered Box – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2009 [169.2] :: 378. ↓-53 (325) : Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1995 [159.6] ::
These are all sliding off of holiday sales highs; comic strip collections do gangbusters business in December (particularly those big hardcover slipcased sets, which sell for quite a bit less online) not to mention the calendars —
Yes, I know calendars aren’t graphic novels. We could also argue the comic strip collections aren’t graphic novels. But I do know I read almost every Far Side gag panel as part of those old page-a-day calendars and for a significant portion of the fan base, that was just about the only way they read them.
[If it makes you feel better, no calendars will be included in the charts starting with reported rankings for Jan. 17th. It’s interesting to track sales in the lead up to a new year, but at some point it’s really kind of sad and I don’t want these hanging around clogging up the charts into March and April.]
Here’s an incomplete of Andrews McMeel titles (just the ones I’ve tracked as having sold online in the past year)
1121. ↓-266 (855) : Baby Blues My Space – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2009 [30.1] :: 2122. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Baby Blues Something Chocolate This Way Comes – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2006 [0.4] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Baby Blues This Is Going to Be Tougher Than We Thought – Andrews McMeel, Apr 1991 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Baby Blues Our Server Is Down – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2005 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Baby Blues We Are Experiencing Parental Difficulties, Please Stand By – Andrews McMeel, Mar 1995 [0.0] ::
1944. ↑ (last ranked 30 Aug 09) : Boondocks Because I Know You Don’t Read No Newspaper – Andrews McMeel, Aug 2000 [3.2] ::
Please note: most Boondocks collections are published by Three Rivers Press (Random House)
164. ↓-2 (162) : Calvin & Hobbes Complete – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2005 [276.4] :: 335. ↓-50 (285) : Calvin & Hobbes Scientific Progress Goes Boink – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1991 [177.6] :: 378. ↓-53 (325) : Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1995 [159.6] :: 413. ↓-53 (360) : Calvin & Hobbes Indispensable Calvin & Hobbes – Andrews McMeel, Jun 1992 [148.7] :: 418. ↓-41 (377) : Calvin & Hobbes It’s a Magical World – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1996 [146.6] :: 419. ↓-33 (386) : Calvin & Hobbes Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1992 [146.2] :: 453. ↓-52 (401) : Calvin & Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1989 [136.3] :: 467. ↓-43 (424) : Calvin & Hobbes Authoritative Calvin & Hobbes – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1990 [131.2] :: 493. ↓-56 (437) : Calvin & Hobbes Something Under the Bed Is Drooling – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1988 [124.5] :: 498. ↓-66 (432) : Calvin & Hobbes Weirdos from Another Planet – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1990 [123.3] :: 519. ↓-47 (472) : Calvin & Hobbes Essential Calvin & Hobbes – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1988 [118.6] :: 522. ↓-247 (275) : Calvin & Hobbes Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1994 [117.9] :: 626. ↓-84 (542) : Calvin & Hobbes There’s Treasure Everywhere – Andrews McMeel, Mar 1996 [90.3] :: 666. ↓-92 (574) : Calvin & Hobbes The Revenge of the Baby-Sat – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1991 [84.7] :: 706. ↑257 (963) : Calvin & Hobbes – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1987 [77.1] :: 731. ↓-101 (630) : Calvin & Hobbes The Days Are Just Packed – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1993 [73.5] :: 789. ↓-107 (682) : Calvin & Hobbes Yukon Ho – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1989 [66.2] :: 2312. ↓-797 (1515) : Calvin & Hobbes Sunday Pages ’85-‘95 – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2001 [0.1] ::
2075. ↑ (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Close to Home A Million Little Pieces – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2006 [1.1] ::
166. ↑26 (192) : Dilbert 2010 Wall Calendar – Andrews McMeel, Jul 2009 [273.2] :: 301. ↓-18 (283) : Dilbert 2010 Day-to-Day Calendar – Andrews McMeel, Jul 2009 [191.7] :: 313. ↓-81 (232) : Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2008 [187.3] :: 355. ↓-49 (306) : Dilbert 14 Years of Loyal Service in a Fabric-Covered Box – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2009 [169.2] :: 573. ↓-59 (514) : Dilbert Freedom’s Just Another Word for People Finding Out You’re Useless – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2009 [102.6] :: 1001. ↓-184 (817) : Dilbert This Is the Part Where You Pretend to Add Value – Andrews McMeel, May 2008 [41.1] :: 1076. ↑1161 (2237) : Dilbert 2010 Mini Wall Calendar – Andrews McMeel, Jul 2009 [34.2] :: 1975. ↑new (0) : Dilbert Another Day in Cubicle Paradise – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2002 [2.4] :: 2060. ↑ (last ranked 19 Jul 09) : Dilbert Try Rebooting Yourself – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2006 [1.3] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Dilbert Words You Don’t Want to Hear During Your Annual Review – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2003 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 28 Jun 09) : Dilbert Cubes & Punishment – Andrews McMeel, Nov 2007 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Dilbert Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy – Andrews McMeel, Mar 1995 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Dilbert Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies – Andrews McMeel, Mar 1994 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 19 Jul 09) : Dilbert Casual Day Has Gone Too Far – Andrews McMeel, Feb 2003 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 19 Jul 09) : Dilbert I’m Not Anti-Business, I’m Anti-Idiot – Andrews McMeel, Mar 1998 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 19 Jul 09) : Dilbert It’s Not Funny If I have to Explain It – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2004 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 9 Aug 09) : Dilbert Positive Attitude – Andrews McMeel, Jul 2007 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 30 Aug 09) : Dilbert The Fluorescent Light Glistens Off Your Head – Andrews McMeel, May 2005 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 30 Aug 09) : Dilbert What Would Wally Do – Andrews McMeel, Jun 2006 [0.0] ::
701. ↓-78 (623) : Doonesbury Tee Time in Berzerkistan – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2009 [78.1] :: 2045. ↑ (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Doonesbury The War Within – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2006 [1.5] :: 2106. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Doonesbury The Long Road Home – Andrews McMeel, Jun 2005 [0.6] :: . (last ranked 16 Aug 09) : Doonesbury Dude: The Big Book of Zonker – Andrews McMeel, Dec 2005 [0.0] ::
. (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Duplex Bad Habits – Andrews McMeel, Nov 2006 [0.0] ::
. (last ranked 3 May 09) : F Minus: This Can’t Be Legal – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2009 [0.0] ::
293. ↓-73 (220) : Far Side Complete – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2003 [195.2] :: 464. ↓-48 (416) : Far Side Gallery 1 – Andrews McMeel, Oct 1984 [131.9] :: 647. ↓-117 (530) : Far Side Gallery 2 – Andrews McMeel, Oct 1986 [87.0] :: 845. ↓-138 (707) : Far Side Gallery 5 – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1995 [59.8] :: 943. ↓-163 (780) : Far Side Prehistory – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1989 [47.7] :: 961. ↓-212 (749) : Far Side Gallery 3 – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1988 [45.7] :: 996. ↓-246 (750) : Far Side Gallery 4 – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1993 [41.6] :: 1482. ↓-425 (1057) : Far Side Wiener Dog Art – Andrews McMeel, Oct 1990 [11.0] :: 2125. ↓-837 (1288) : Far Side Beyond the Far Side – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1983 [0.3] :: 2271. ↑new (0) : Far Side Valley of the Far Side – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1985 [0.1] :: 2318. ↓-738 (1580) : Far Side The Chickens Are Restless – Andrews McMeel, Oct 1993 [0.1] :: 2539. ↑ (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Far Side The Curse of Madame C – Andrews McMeel, Oct 1994 [0.1] :: 2561. ↑ (last ranked 9 Aug 09) : Far Side In Search of the Far Side – Andrews McMeel, Jul 1984 [0.1] :: 2614. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Far Side Cows of Our Planet – Andrews McMeel, Jun 1992 [0.1] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Far Side Last Chapter & Worse – Andrews McMeel, Sep 1996 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 12 Jul 09) : Far Side Unnatural Selections – Andrews McMeel, Oct 1991 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 19 Jul 09) : Far Side It Came from the Far Side – Andrews McMeel, Jul 1986 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 9 Aug 09) : Far Side Observer – Andrews McMeel, Oct 1987 [0.0] ::
2099. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : For Better or for Worse Striking a Chord – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2005 [0.7] :: 2273. ↑new (0) : For Better or for Worse It’s the Thought That Counts – Andrews McMeel, Aug 1994 [0.1] :: 2548. ↑ (last ranked 12 Jul 09) : For Better or for Worse The Last Straw – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1985 [0.1] :: 2578. ↑ (last ranked 23 Aug 09) : For Better or for Worse Pushing 40 – Andrews McMeel, Jan 1988 [0.1] :: . (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : For Better or for Worse Graduation – Andrews McMeel, Aug 2001 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : For Better or for Worse Just A Simple Wedding – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2009 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : For Better or for Worse Never Wink at a Worried Woman – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2005 [0.0] ::
427. ↓-44 (383) : FoxTrot Wrapped-Up – Andrews McMeel, May 2009 [143.8] :: 449. ↓-26 (423) : FoxTrot Math, Science, & Unix Underpants – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2009 [137.7] :: 1988. ↓-203 (1785) : FoxTrot Jam-Packed – Andrews McMeel, Aug 2006 [2.3] :: 2081. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : FoxTrot My Hot Dog Went Out, Can I Have Another – Andrews McMeel, Aug 2005 [1.0] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : FoxTrot FoxTrotius Maximus – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2004 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 17 May 09) : FoxTrot Death by Field Trip – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2001 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : FoxTrot Beyond a Doubt – Andrews McMeel, Mar 1997 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : FoxTrot Orlando Bloom Has Ruined Everything – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2005 [0.0] ::
. (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Frazz Live at Bryson Elementary – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2005 [0.0] ::
698. ↓-63 (635) : New Yorker Cartoon Collections On the Money: The Economy in Cartoons, 1925-2009 – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2009 [78.5] :: . (last ranked 28 Jun 09) : New Yorker Cartoon Collections The New Yorker Book of Mom Cartoons – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2008 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 26 Jul 09) : New Yorker Cartoon Collections The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2008 [0.0] ::
. (last ranked 16 Aug 09) : Non Sequitur Sunday Color Treasury – Andrews McMeel, Nov 2005 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Non Sequitur Lucy And Danae: Something Silly This Way Comes – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2005 [0.0] ::
320. ↓-76 (244) : Peanuts Celebrating Peanuts: 60 Years – Andrews McMeel, Nov 2009 [183.4] :: 1729. ↑new (0) : Peanuts Sudoku Comic Digest: 200 Puzzles Plus 50 Classic Peanuts Cartoons – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2008 [6.4] :: 1972. ↑new (0) : Peanuts Around the World in 45 Years: Charlie Brown’s Anniversary Celebration – Andrews McMeel, Nov 1994 [2.5] :: 2319. ↓-737 (1582) : Peanuts Being a Dog Is a Full-Time Job – Andrews McMeel, Apr 1994 [0.1] ::
(At least one person at Universal Press Syndicate probably has an aneurysm each time the Fantagraphics collections are mentioned)
508. ↓-45 (463) : Pearls Before Swine The Saturday Evening Pearls – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2009 [121.4] :: 730. ↓-61 (669) : Pearls Before Swine The Crass Menagerie – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2008 [73.6] :: 902. ↓-132 (770) : Pearls Before Swine Lions & Tigers & Crocs, Oh My! – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2006 [53.0] :: 1048. ↑43 (1091) : Pearls Before Swine Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata – Andrews McMeel, May 2007 [36.6] :: 1416. ↓-353 (1063) : Pearls Before Swine Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2004 [13.4] :: 1656. ↓-9 (1647) : Pearls Before Swine Pearls Sells Out – Andrews McMeel, Aug 2009 [7.4] :: 2027. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Pearls Before Swine The Ratvolution Will Not Be Televised – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2006 [1.7] :: 2112. ↓-482 (1630) : Pearls Before Swine Nighthogs – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2005 [0.4] :: . (1982) : Pearls Before Swine Macho Macho Animals – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2008 [0.0] :: . (2514) : Pearls Before Swine BLTs Taste So Darn Good – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2003 [0.0] ::
1052. ↓-90 (962) : Pickles Still Pickled After All These Years – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2004 [36.1] :: 1071. ↓-185 (886) : Pickles Let’s Get Pickled – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2006 [34.6] ::
2263. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Rose Is Rose Red Carpet Rose – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2006 [0.2] :: 2587. ↑ (last ranked 30 Aug 09) : Rose Is Rose Running on Alter Ego – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2005 [0.1] ::
2004. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Sherman’s Lagoon In Shark Years I’m Dead – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2006 [2.1] :: 2090. ↑new (0) : Sherman’s Lagoon A Day at the Beach – Andrews McMeel, Apr 2005 [0.8] :: 2110. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Sherman’s Lagoon Surfer Safari – Andrews McMeel, Aug 2005 [0.5] :: 2289. ↑new (0) : Sherman’s Lagoon 1991 to 2001: Greatest Hits – Andrews McMeel, Aug 2002 [0.1] ::
1992. ↑ (last ranked 30 Aug 09) : The Flying McCoys – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2006 [2.3] ::
2015. ↑ (last ranked 19 Jul 09) : Ziggy A Little Character Goes a Long Way – Andrews McMeel, May 2006 [1.9] :: 2022. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Ziggy Ziggy’s Gift – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2005 [1.8] ::
431. ↓-70 (361) : Zits My Bad – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2009 [143.6] :: 1599. ↓-248 (1351) : Zits Alternative Zits – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2007 [8.4] :: 2032. ↑ (last ranked 5 Jul 09) : Zits Are We Out of the Driveway Yet? – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2006 [1.6] :: 2089. ↑ (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Zits Pimp My Lunch – Andrews McMeel, Oct 2005 [0.9] :: 2331. ↓-554 (1777) : Zits Crack of Noon – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2006 [0.1] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Zits Humongous Zits – Andrews McMeel, Mar 2000 [0.0] :: . (last ranked 6 Sep 09) : Zits Busted – Andrews McMeel, Sep 2002 [0.0] ::
##
That’s it for this week’s special feature; comments, questions, concerns?
For those of you who don’t want to read the last post, I’ll just note that the ISBNs below correspond to the e-book version (smart pubs are issuing unique isbns to e-books, and smart retailers will use them) & also that the five titles I used as a teaser in the initial post are also included below.
My interest in trying to ‘sell’ you on e-books has significantly waned in the past week; not because I don’t believe in the format but because of the time it takes to write up (or even just cut-n-paste) the damn summaries and links. (this is time I could be spending on other essays and features, and my time is a very dear commodity at the moment)
I’ll give you a huge head start — these are titles available from both B&N and Amazon — but you’re going to have to run that last leg yourself.
Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir, Laurie Sandell, Little Brown & Co., 9780316053426
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, adapted by Peter Huper, Three Rivers Press (Random House), 9780307717009
The Shiniest Jewel, Marion Henley, Grand Central (Hachette), 9780446542241
Vlad the Impaler, Sid Jacobson & Ernie Colon, Hudson Street Press (Penguin), 9781101150962
The World of Quest: Volume 2, Jason Kruse, Yen/Orbit (Hachette), 9780759529908
[Oddly, Volume 1 is not available as an ebook; Kurt, please fix this pronto.]
Also of interest:
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel, 2nd Edition, Nat Gertler, Alpha (Penguin), 9781101155615
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, David Hajdu, FSG, 9781429937054
Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed, Brian Cronin, Penguin, 9781101045244
Comic Books 101, Chris Ryall & Scott Tipton, F+W, 9781440307904
##
The Future is Now, the books are out there. Note that almost all of these are from big publishers — DC & Disney/Marvel may get left behind. But then again, if graphic-novels-as-e-books become a new way for ‘indy’, ‘arty’ graphic novels to reach a larger audience (if only because there is no spandex or manga competition), is this necessarily a bad thing?
per new FTC rules I must at this time disclose that when, in the past, I referred to my current employment as “field management for one of the big box bookstore chains” what I really meant was that I work for Barnes & Noble (an open secret, as I have disclosed that fact before in other fora). As I am about to discuss one of B&N’s corporate products (not always in the most glowing light, fwiw) I feel it is necessary to point out, once more, that they are the Big Corporation That Signs My Paychecks™. If that doesn’t matter to you, please forget I mentioned it.
past my normal (and I assure you, well earned) pay, no other enticement or compensation was provided by my employer for this post, the following article was neither suggested by nor sanctioned by B&N corporate, and wasn’t submitted to any of my supervisors for review before posting. All opinions and comments are my own, & while I do include links to Barnes & Noble’s site I’m about to encourage you to make the most of the free applications and samples that are available there. And: damn the FTC regulations are a bitch.
We cool?
##
All the buzz about the Nook (in some quarters styled the ‘nook’ but true to my Germanic Roots I feel Nouns, and certainly all Brands, should be capitalized) and the anticipation of the Nook vs. Kindle Cagematch have overshadowed at least one point:
dude, you can read e-books right now on your home computer or laptop.
Prior to the Nook, B&N also announced (to much hoopla, at the time) e-reader software that would run equally well on your Mac, PC, iPhone, or Blackberry — stuff you already own — without the need for a fancy new $260 appliance.
Which is fine, if you don’t mind reading on your existing computer screen — if you’re reading this actual sentence (posted to a blog) I can’t imagine that you’d have an objection…
Not that the B&N eReader is a fabulous chunk of new Web 2.0 awesomeness — it looks and feels like a 1998 application: bare bones, MS-Windows default menus, buttons, and toolbars, and very little in the way of user comforts. The interface is far from intuitive, you need a current account with B&N or else you can’t even view free samples of new e-books, and you can’t click on a title in your online library to read it, you have to download it to your local ‘bookshelf’, and change screens, before hitting that ‘read’ button even becomes an option.
Granted, 11 years ago? This was minor sh*t. Nowadays, if you want to compete with iTunes? We need to do better.
Quite a few (almost all) of my objections go out the window when we reconsider ‘free’ — the app is free to download, OS agnostic, cross-OS compatible, you can access a single ‘online library’ from all your toys (phone, netbook, laptop, desktop) with minimal hassle — and you can read the same e-books on any or all of them with only the single purchase.
##
Here’s a download link for you; took me about 15 minutes to download and install the software to a new PC this evening.
##
And an aside: Did you know that publishers are already assigning e-books their own unique ISBNs? Assuming this isn’t some kind of fluke (or B&N specific), in the future this is going to make searching for (and linking, and buying) individual e-books much easier.
So what’s already out there?
Anyway, all the nuts-and-bolts aside, and back to the promise of Graphic Novels as e-books: here’s what I found.
— and I’d like to note a free sample/preview is available for all of the following titles. [I said ‘free’; there are other costs. It took me hours, and multiple tries, to get some few ‘free’ samples downloaded so there is an investment of time&effort to take into account in this instance, even just to get to the previews. And some of them would just stall mid-download… I shut down μtorrent, I stopped Sirius Internet Radio, I closed everything but the browser and B&N reader, and still couldn’t get the Epileptic sample — so I went ahead and just bought the e-book; $10, no biggie.]
‘08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail, Michael Crowley & Dan Goldman, Three Rivers Press (Random House), 9780307588722, B&N – Amazon
“Taking its cue from campaign classics like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and The Making of the President Series, 08 brings politico journalism into the graphic novel form. Reflect on all the single-issue candidates, the pundits, the meltdowns, the awkward missteps, and the ruthless maneuvers of the scorched-earth campaign trail as they knit themselves into a political tale of the present-day battle for the future of America.”
Epileptic, David B., Pantheon (Random House), 97803075522955, B&N – Amazon
“Hailed by The Comics Journal as one of Europe’s most important and innovative comics artists, David B. has created a masterpiece in Epileptic, his stunning and emotionally resonant autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother. Epileptic gathers together and makes available in English for the first time all six volumes of the internationally acclaimed graphic work.”
The Shiniest Jewel, Marion Henley, Grand Central (Hachette), 9780446542241, B&N – Amazon
“At 49, cartoonist Marian Henley hasn’t committed to marrying the man with whom she has been dating for seven years. But as the Big 5-0 looms, she realizes that above all else she wants a child. Her story follows the heartbreaking ups and downs of going through the international adoption process; deciding when it’s time to grow up and maybe even get married; and in the end, it’s the story of a daughter’s relationship with her father, and how becoming a mother finally led her to understand him. THESHINIESTJEWEL is a touching narrative, accompanied by Marian’s winsome drawings, that beautifully weaves together her realizations about the joy, and sometimes heartbreak, of building a family.”
Dark Wraith of Shannara, Terry Brooks with Edwin David & Robert Place Napton, Ballantine (Random House), 9780307494740, B&N – Amazon
“The first-ever Graphic Novel set in the World of Shannara! … If you’ve never ventured into the wondrous world of Shannara, consider this an ideal opportunity. Prepare to enter the breathtaking realm of the Four Lands, where beings both noble and sinister have quested and clashed, crossed swords in the names of darkness and light, and engaged in adventures rich with mystery and majesty. “
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, adapted by Peter Huper, Three Rivers Press (Random House), 9780307717009, B&N – Amazon
Kafka’s work of man-as-bug, from provider to his family kicked back (by the impossible twist of fate that has to be accepted because hell, it’s the first line that opens the story) to a parasite. Weird, weird stuff — now in comic form.
[part one of… 4? (if I can find more I’ll post ‘em.) …next five titles tomorrow.]
[with diversions into the worlds of music, arts, publishing, history, wikipedia, and my own life]
Disclaimers & An Introduction
I like books generally and comics specifically, so the focus and argument of this essay will reflect that bias. But it would not be a major stretch to derive from these specifics some generalities that cover all “old” and “new” media, and in fact I will draw liberally from the worlds of music and art to make my point. Also, I went to a tech school — my forté is math, my passion music appreciation, my majors included physics, engineering, and architecture, and my degree… … Dammit! I knew I forgot something.
My friends occasionally joke that I was the first (and last) Liberal Arts major at Georgia Tech. I spent seven years and a lot of money treating a major research university like my personal intellectual buffet — but it was a tech school so even given my proclivities my efforts hit certain natural limits. I didn’t have an opportunity for in-depth studies in Classics or philosophy, my Latin is rudimentary at best, my Greek is worse, and when I cite Plato and Aristotle I’m relying on 15 year old memories, very short introductions and even [gasp] wikipedia. [my math, however, is excellent.] That, and I tend to drink steadily while writing these long-form blog posts, so I make no guarantees as to clarity and coherence, particularly as we approach the end. (to mitigate that this post was actually written in parts over two weeks.)
[addendum: and it seems the worst part of writing blog posts while drunk is not the expected errors of grammar and spelling, but rather an over-reliance on italics and “quotes” — I beg your forgiveness and forbearance on both points.]
##
The occasion of this essay is the entry of a major retailer of durable goods into the new world of digital media.
The durable goods are books in this case, and the retailer is Barnes & Noble. Not only has the company launched an e-book store (an appendage on their existing web site) they recently announced a new e-book appliance which promises the moon & stars & everything Kindle does and more — but which hasn’t shipped yet. (and which lacks at least one key feature of the Kindle — but a feature that was being sabotaged by major publishers anyway.)
E-books, and to a lesser extent the nascent digital comics industry (excluding webcomics, which are native digital and hence follow web-rules and also enjoy a different, more casual perception from the intended audience) are seen as either the Great Hope or Great Evil or the Great Unknown by an industry that hasn’t seen this kind of change since Gutenberg re-invented and popularized the Chinese innovation of moveable type. Of course, Gutenberg combined that with the novel invention of the printing press — and the contemporaneous attempts to mass-produce books and sell them at a profit which invented the industry that now finds itself at a loss in the face of change.
That is to say, e-books are the first truly new model in publishing in 569 years.
Many an enthusiastic blogger will tell you as much (often just before trying to sell you on a stock). I think it’s important to discuss the why and how, though — and the answers to these questions will reveal that the so-called revolution is really just an incremental change, the most recent iteration of an ongoing conversation between Creator, Consumer, and Mediator (in the case of books, what we currently call a Publisher). [and this post is more about philosophy than business, law, copyrights, freedom of speech, public domain, orphaned works, copyleft, Creative Commons, the future of publishing, and the concept of ‘content’ generally — but I might just touch on all those points before we’re done.]
“Ya gonna buy that, bub?”
Let’s start with an extended aside on piracy.
Nowadays, any mention of “piracy” almost always devolves into arguments that start with music sharing but spill into worlds of online video & downloads, and even more esoteric topics (torrents, warez, fansubs, & scanlation) and in the end the Official Line is that Sharing is Bad. Illegal copies proliferate on the internet to such an extent that it seems obvious to anyone that the internet must be the font and well of all piracy.
Hold on to that a sec.
I work at a bookstore. Yes, that means I sell books — but I spend at least as much time each day collecting and reshelving the books, magazines and newspapers that patrons pulled off of shelves and displays, took to the far corners of my store to read, and then left in situ just as soon as they were done reading them.
Someone grabs a magazine off the rack; maybe it’s the same title every month, maybe it’s a new title they haven’t read before but this month’s cover is compelling enough to make them pick it up. They read it cover to cover. (or at least, they flip through looking at the ads and skimming the articles and lingering fondly over some few pictorials — but no page passes unlooked-at.)
This magazine reader just made a ‘copy’. It’s not word-for-word perfect, but merely by reading they have a good-enough copy that they don’t feel compelled to buy the actual, physical magazine they’ve just read. This is a type of Piracy that gets no press: thousands of people every day steal magazines and newspapers from retailers.
I could expand that to books, easily, for those patrons who either read a few chapters and decide not to buy, on to folks who read whole books (or work their way through entire study guides one question at a time, but on scratch paper without writing in the source) and then reshelve the books like they never touched them. And yes, actually — this works. Once or twice. But any reading contributes to shop wear — and I should put that in quotes but instead I’ll define it for you: Shop Wear is the degradation of stock as a result of casual browsers (and more intensive use) and while any single customer might object and say there is no way one person reading a book could possibly damage the solid, durable tome — over time all this browsing does in fact degrade the original. (And those of you who crease the spines of brand new paperbacks: you suck, and there is a special level of hell reserved for you. just sayin’.)
Just because we force a reader to go into a store (or library) doesn’t make that copy less valid. After I read a book, I ‘own’ a copy of the book — it exists in my memory. (this is how I can reference Plato and Aristotle in a blog post, as we’ll see later, but also pertains generally to everything I’ve every read, from the age of 4 back in 1977 right up to the business blogs talking about B&N’s Nook that I read yesterday.) Just by reading, one book a day on average every day since I grokked literacy, I’ve made copies of at least 12,000 books.
Since reading is legal (for now), that means I’ve made 12,000+ legal copies of all kinds of books just by keeping my eyes open.
Every reader is making a personal ‘copy’. Without paying for it. On the internet, they call this piracy. The bookstore actuality is Worse: while a digital copy is just a missed sale, habitual browsers and readers physically damage merchandise to the extent that eventually, we’re forced to discount it at best, or the item is physically unsalable at worst. We lose both the sale to the “pirate”, and part or all of any future sale.
Suddenly, though, with the introduction of digital reproduction, this same process — the making of copies — becomes so trivial that it happens even without you realizing it: every web page, once loaded in a browser, is a copy. Every email in your inbox is a copy — and email is distributed hand-over-hand through dozens of servers so there may be dozens of copies made before you read it.
Unlike memories, which are tricky at best, or hard copies, which degrade over time with use (and ever so slowly, also degrade even if never used just because of the second law of thermodynamics), digital copies are perfect (as far as it goes), loss-less, and after the investment in equipment (computer, internet) so cheap as to be almost free, and to an extent “permanent”. So long as the support infrastructure exists (computers, decoding schema, storage media, electrical grids) this copy will persist forever. The ease and “free” cost of making digital copies also means dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of copies are made and stored all over the internet.
It’s a great way to make copies. The trick is, Who Gets Paid?
Ideally, the creator of a work will get both due credit and remuneration for their efforts. This is a good thing, but it is also a relatively new wrinkle in the distribution of knowledge.
America: A Nation of Pirates until 1891
Historically — pre-historically — if you had a song or a story and you wanted to share it, it involved a lot of personal commitment: you had to get out there and sell it. You had to perform it, actually, as there was no other way to make copies past telling another person and putting a copy in their head. And it would take quite a bit of repetition to get even a passable copy — and it also required someone else who liked the story or lyrics enough to memorize your work, and to then perform it themselves.
This is the oral tradition, the first publishing model. (the etymology of publication is from the Latin publicatus: making something public)
With the development of writing systems, the words could be given a more durable form — one now able to communicate across thousands of years. The Transmission of Knowledge™ passes from the bards to the scribes; and suddenly the corpus of all human knowlegde is not just the copies held in collective living memory but also copies (the first back-ups) made laboriously by hand. These copies were limited by the same criteria we have today: scribes (computers) had to know the written languages (decoding schema) and relied on storage media (clay, vellum, papyrus) and support systems (libraries don’t need electricity but they do need to be staffed; it also helps if they are dry, ventilated, and sound — fireproof is a plus but not a given — and stable, tolerant political and religious systems are nice but rare & can’t be counted on).
Every book that we now enjoy is a result of the making of copies. Our knowledge of the classics is dependent on centuries of hand-copies. We only know of most oral traditions because someone took the time to make a copy — to utilize new technology (writing was once new) to preserve the best of the past.
Mechanization in the production of copies is also not new; as noted above some German tosser came up with a hand-operated press that could do as much five centuries ago. In fact, this new ease in making copies (and the commensurate profits for publishers made possible by taking advantage of the new economies of scale) led to the first copyright laws in 1662. These “copy rights” are all about law, and money, and have very little to do with books (and those other works now covered as copyright gets expanded all the time)
There was a tipping point 569 years ago.
Before Gutenberg, the primary concern (and largest problem) of a creator was to be *remembered*. Anything that perpetuated the work was not only accepted, but embraced. The fear wasn’t that a work would be stolen, but that it would be forgotten. After the ability to make copies cheaply and in number, the primary concern of a creator changed: now it was important not only to get credit, but also to get paid. (Piracy is not just the distribution of copies, occasionally it is also plagiarism: the outright theft of a work, stripping its attribution and claiming it as one’s own; also, piracy can be the incorrect attribution of a work to a famous creator to make a forgery more valuable on the open market — playing on the value of a name, rather than the value of a work.) Since it was so easy (for the times) to make copies, it wasn’t the copies themselves that were the problem but the ability of third parties to flood the market with competing copies. [sound familiar?]
Charles Dickens never made a dime off of any of his works sold in America. In fact, publishers had runners to meet the ships from England coming in at the dock, to get the latest works to their offices that much faster, so they could publish their pirated version and get it to market first, ahead of the other pirates publishers. America did not fix this hole in our copyright law until 1891. While the printed books [in America] did nothing for his bottom line, Dickens found it immensely profitable to tour — yes, tour — and sold out theaters to yanks eager to hear him read, among other things, A Christmas Carol. [furtherreadings for the curious] So even pirated copies can lead to profit with the right business model.
It took the law a while to catch up to a new transmission method: in Dickens’s case, it was the trans-Atlantic Clipper. The law also had to catch up to the new production methods: it took 270 years to go from from Gutenberg to codified “Copy Rights“, and another 175 years after that for the idea to sink in and become law in enough countries that the idea of an international treaty and consistent standard could take root. From 1439 to 1886 (and on to 1891 in America) there was something of a free-for-all going on, with illegal copies being produced and distributed all over the place.
For the cost of core equipment and a nominal set-up fee, one could run-off as many copies as the availability of ink, paper, and consumer demand made possible. The equipment these days is different, and we’re quickly moving to a post-paper culture, but the problems and opportunities are the same. If we figure out the new complications introduced by digital media & the internet in less than 4 centuries: hey, we’ll be ahead of the game.
Pause here.
Lest we think copies are evil: The Gutenberg Press and its descendants, and their output, were responsible for a massive increase in public literacy, with resultant gains in both education and innovation, the transmission of knowledge from local centres of learning to the far corners of the globe, the innauguration of a permanent and shared record that not only enabled but one could argue spawned the scientific method, the origination of professional journalism, and a consistent downward pressure on the costs of books (at least to the limits of technology) making the printed word accessable to most. Add on a dedicated cadre of librarians and the charitable impulse and subsequent efforts of one brave, smart man (among others, but Carnegie gets the nod here) and today a goodly chunk of the accumulated knowledge of mankind is available for free (or for a nominal yearly fee) to anyone in the developed world.
This, all because we got better at making copies. Copies are a good thing. Cheap copies are better. And no author, if they’re any good, need worry any more about being forgotten — unless of course they just get lost, over time, in the mountain of printed material that we produce.
The printing press is a hulking monster of metal, and even the new versions with phototypesetting and high speed rotary drums are beasts of machinery (watch your fingers, or arms for that matter) and are definitely part and parcel of the Industrial Age.
The new digital methods and methodologies mean that anyone with a computer, printer, and appropriate software (“the cost of core equipment and a nominal set-up fee”) is now a ‘printer’ and publisher; in fact, one can publish direct to the web without dirtying a single thin slab of pressed wood pulp. The equivalent of the whole of Gutenberg’s shop will fit on my desk, and *I* can print copies of the bible faster.
Where will the new ‘press’ take us?
Ask me in 400 years.
Are you selling plastic, or music?
Downloads are killing the music industry. That’s the RIAA Party line, anyway. The most likely explanation is that the Music Industry is killing music and the kids are deciding to spend their money elsewere: Charles Arthur writing for The Guardian (UK) technology blog tracks down the numbers, back to 1999. — and the results will surprise you. Music sales are down 50% over the decade, but are still more than a £1 Billion — while sales of video games quadrupled.
It’s not like the industry died — a billion is a billion (and are they really suffering?)— and it’s not like the kids stopped spending money. They just don’t like your offerings much, and would rather put their Dollars/Pounds/Euro/Yen where the value is: the video game is the entertainment touchstone of the 90s, and in the early years of the 21st century the Games Industry more and more seems like the New Media much touted for the past 20 years. Your crappy, recycled, over-produced pablum isn’t going to move CDs and past sales are not a guarantor of future profits.
Why buy a $20 CD when all we want is the hit single? — which is available for a dollar online. That’s all you need to explain the drop in record sales revenue. Sure, an illegal download is also available — but I could also tape it off of the radio, or borrow it from a friend, or just not listen to it at all. Sure, heard it once. Kinda catchy. Nah, I don’t think I need a copy, thanks.
##
I’ve bought Dark Side of the Moon five times in my short life; in fact, I’m just six months younger than that Pink Floyd album; I have never known a world without it. I’ve heard several of the songs countless times on the radio, saw it performed live in full (Atlanta, 1994, Grant Stadium at Georgia Tech) and heck, even though it is a classic, it’s not like I need a copy. It’s just an album; I’ve heard it so many times I can close my eyes in a quiet room and listen to each song without a stereo: I have a copy in my head.
From a purely business perspective: there’s no way I’d be interested in this album anyway, as I was never part of it’s [1973] demographic and by the time I was making my own purchasing decisions it was 16 years old and I should have been completely taken by whatever was in the Top 40 in 1989. Why would I want Pink Floyd? That’s old. Buy our new stuff, from the new artists who are still on the original (rapine) “standard record contract”.
But this is the triumph of content over form: This one album is good enough that I will buy a copy of it for whatever format, and a new copy with each technological upgrade, from now until I the day I die, or civilization collapses (whichever comes first).
The Dark Side of the Moon is content. It’s music; and a masterpiece, and an exemplar of what the old vinyl LP was capable of as an artform. [and sadly, bound to it’s time: the 50s and 60s were all about singles; the 80s and 90s were all about singles, and the Naughts aparently are all about singles spawned by a crappy reality TV talent show — but in the 70s (discounting disco; and starting in ’69 with Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds) there was a movement toward the album as a complete conceptual work, an effort that rarely is attempted today] When I, as a consumer, talk about a CD — the album of 30+ years ago is what I mean and what I want.
The “CD” that I want has nothing to do with plastic. Or packaging. Or marketing. Sure, you made a lot of money over 27 years selling us 17¢ rounds of plastic with a hole in the middle (at usurious markup), but are you really fooling yourself into thinking that we wanted to buy “CDs”? It’s the current media, but only the current media, and media are changing continuously — from LPs to 8-track to cassette to CD to digital. The record companies have been responsible for all of these changes (save the most recent one) and often promoted one over another even in the face of consumer resistance or a degradation in quality. A victory of Form over Content.
Dear RIAA members & your international counterparts: are you selling plastic?
What happened to the music?
If your audience shows a decided preference for a new format, one with many advantages — physical size [nil], portability, convenience, fidelity [to an extent], and the ability to buy just the singles rather than a whole crap album, 90% of which no one really wants — do you as an industry embrace that format and bend over backwards, racing each other to make your artists’ work available to the public ahead of your competition…
or, just picking the worst, most bass-ackwards solution I can think of…
do you sue your customers for liking your product?
Hell, they like it so much they’ll resort to just about anything to get it in their preferred format even despite your efforts.
##
As stated, I’ve bought Dark Side of the Moon five times. I’ll likely buy it 20 times before I kick it, and just in writing this I was inspired to re-buy the original, and also two covers [Dub and A Capella] for digital download, just because I can. (that, and Easy-Star All-Stars’ Dub Side of the Moon Rocks. just sayin’ If you like Pink Floyd, and you like reggae, it’s an easy up.) (Oh yeah, I bought Dub Side of the Moon on CD, too. And yes, I could rip it but I misplaced the CD in the last move & I don’t mind buying it again in a convenient digital format rather than digging through boxes in my closet for the next day and a half)
I guess this means I’ve bought Dark Side six times now. (more if you count the covers.) Record Companies, you’re welcome.
##
Are you selling plastic, or are you selling music? Why not take advantage of the ability of the internet to produce all-but-free copies, and the ability of the internet to distribute those copies almost-instantaneously and at minimal cost, and the capabilities of the internet to market things for “free”, & to empower and mobilize fan groups — and use all that to sell us music?
— you guys adapted to MTV, why is this new shift so hard to wrap your brains around?
Radiohead is proving you wrong. Reznor is proving you wrong. And for 98% percent of all the other musical acts, the biggest fear isn’t that someone is stealing the music, but that no one is listening. Like our proto-Homer of five millennia past, the problem is not that a work will be stolen, but that it will be forgotten — or just missed in the millions of other alternatives available.
The original is in a museum, owned by the government of France and displayed behind bulletproof glass. Da Vinci created it, at least initially as a work for hire (never delivered to the man whose wife is pictured, though, as Da Vinci continued to work on it throughout his life and even took it with him when he moved from Italy to France); the Original could also be said to be Lisa del Giocondo, the model who posed for Da Vinci, hers is the face, and hers (presumably) was the subtle smile Da Vinci took a lifetime to capture.
So, Who Owns the Mona Lisa?
It will forever be Da Vinci’s work, but it no longer belongs to him or his heirs, or the heirs of Da Vinci’s Student, Salai, who took possession of the work after Da Vinci’s death. The Louvre in Paris can make some claims, and they certainly ‘own’ the painting in a very real sense — but just about anybody can make a copy of it. I have one; since you’re looking at this page (and assuming the image loaded) you also ‘own’ a copy, and even before I brought the topic up, you likely could picture the painting in your mind: not perfect in every detail but there was a copy in your head already.
If anyone should be pissed it’s Francesco del Giocondo, who asked for a painting of his wife (and paid for it?) but who never received one. His might be the strongest case for ownership — as the Mona Lisa as a work, was in modern terms a work for hire — but there is no way this would ever see the inside of a court room.
No matter who owns the painting itself (a unique artefact) or who might make claims to the use of the image (If Da Vinci had Disney’s lawyers, and a sympathetic legislator like Sonny Bono, we’d be discussing the relative merits of extending copyright for a sixth or seventh century after the death of the creator — while living in a sparse, grey, unadorned dystopia) in fact the Mona Lisa belongs to the world. To all of us. It is part of the culture, part of our collective heritage (a body of knowledge referred to by some as the public domain) and no matter how or how often we use the image, the value of the original isn’t affected — one could even argue that the value is enhanced: If a Mona Lisa smiled in a forest, but no one ever saw it, is it still a valuable work of art?
The Mona Lisa is a special case — not unique so much in that other iconic works are equally valuable: some paintings, some buildings, some plays, some few poems, and even a book or two — but given it’s [disputed] status as “the most valuable painting in the world” and the very recognizable visage & profile, Lisa is a handy shorthand for all “unique” works: The original will always have a value not held by any copy.
And it doesn’t matter who owns it.
Paperbacks didn’t destroy publishing
Go back 120 years — say, to 1890. Books would have been expensive luxuries. Carnegie was just beginning his efforts to open public libraries (having started in 1883) so odds weren’t all that good that your town (or city) had one. In fact, the very idea of a ‘public’ library would have only been 150 years old or so in 1890 (I’m citing Franklin’s Library Company of Philidelphia in this case, 1731, and it was a subscription library — only open to paying members).
In the century since 1890, technology and new business models have pushed the printed word from a luxury for the rich into everyone’s living rooms, bedrooms, and classrooms.
100 years ago, if you didn’t live in a city you’d count yourself lucky to be able to buy dime novels at the general store. 80 years ago you could join a book club and get new books in the mail; 70 years ago you’d have been able to pick up a cheap paperback version of many of the same books at the train station newsstand.
Paperbacks moved from newstands into spinner racks at the local drugstore or grocery. The popularity of the format (read: low price) also made it a staple of many of the small, independent booksellers — and 50 years ago the model became established: first a hardcover edition for the libraries, collectors, snooty book critics in New York, and the handful of capital-B Bookstores in the urban centres — and then if it proves popular, you go back to presses for a Book-of-the-Month Club edition, or auction off the paperback publishing rights to the highest bidder.
Paperbacks were and weren’t radical:
Yes, they were cheaper. While initially introduced as value editions of the classics and bestsellers, soon the lower costs of manufacture induced some publishers to create new works (and whole genres) to take advantage of the format. Stories which might never have seen print due to either “lurid” content or lack of a “literary” appeal suddenly found a new home, and mountains of books were printed to feed the pulp market. Some of these were reprints of material previously available in fiction anthology magazines — a format that is, sadly, mostly extinct — the magazines fed a fan base that later bought the books, and the magazines were a crucible that forged not just the fans of the works but also their creators. Mystery, Romance, and Sci-fi all exist today as genres — popular genres that support their own hardcover releases — because of the decades of pulps… but that would be another essay.
A paperback book has a floppy cover, but was still recognizable as a book. If one weren’t hung up on the literary “value” and “merit” of a Book-as-object, then the opportunity to buy one at a cheaper price because you want to, you know, enjoy it is a no-brainer. Here was the first movement toward books as popular entertainment, and also provided a way “in”, to merge centuries of Pop Culture Trash back into the literary tradition.
And that was a good thing.
Shakespeare was once pop entertainment for the masses — not a printed story but one meant to be performed before a crowd, with ribald (read: sexy & suggestive) jokes and bloodshed and body counts and important commentaries on class, authority, race, religion, and — if one can adjust slightly to the Elizabethan world view — also insightful looks into gender equity and relations.
Nowadays it’s literature; back then it was equivalent to sweeps-week TV sensationalism.
Later generations will cherry-pick the best of romance, mystery, and sci-fi and hold them up as Fine Literature — while either ignoring their base roots as pulp genres printed by the bushel to feed a near-insatiable market, or romanticizing their ‘common’ roots and attempting to make hay out of the fact that previous critics ignored or dismissed them. That’s fine too. (Quick, name another Elizabethan or Jacobian dramatist. Kit Marlowe doesn’t count.)
Pop Culture should eventually become part of not only the canon and corpus but also part of the academic study of literature, story, character, and myth. Not just Shakespeare, but Sherlock, and Snoopy, and Snoop Dog — all popular, all products of their time, and eventually: all grist for the mill that is humanity and the Humanities.
Paperbacks didn’t kill literature, and they not only didn’t kill publishing but expanded it to whole new frontiers. Even comics — “trade paperback” is currently used as a synonym for “collected archives” and if Penguin Books hadn’t started in 1935, and been successful maybe there wouldn’t be a common, established method for re-publishing comics (or an incentive to publish original graphic novels, which often début in the paperback format) and much of what we have now would have been lost, or would exist only in fond memories, flea markets, and collector’s long boxes.
There is no published rule of thumb, and publishers are loathe to release actual sales figures, but a popular book in hardcover will often prompt sales in paperback that are at least triple the original run (in units, not dollars)
Of course, that statistic is out of my ass, but I have close to a decade of experience on the front lines in bookstores, and there are other factors that might even make my estimate too low:
By the time a book merits a paperback release, there have been 6 to 9 months—or a year—for the book to garner reviews, accumulate a sales history, hit best-seller lists, make the rounds of [some] book clubs [many wait for the paperback release before recommending it to their club] and to otherwise register with the market. Given that a paperback is both cheaper than a new hardcover book, and a proven quantity — one that the publisher can pitch, the retailer can sell, and that a few readers have heard of even if they didn’t bother to read it — means the paperback an easy sell.
In the best case.
Not all paperbacks are created equal; some deserving novels go wanting. But by and large bookselling is a meritocratic system and a trade paperback edition is more like a Bonus Stage on a video game: not a given but if you do well enough on the first level you get a chance to rack up more points.
Other books go direct to paperback; someone did an analysis and their best guess is that the book will sell, but not at $25 a pop. Some publishers specialize in paperback originals; some genres (romance, and first-time authors in sci-fi and mystery) depend on them. And this shouldn’t been seen as a slight — for a specialized niche in an overcrowded book market, you do what you have to, to get books out and make the numbers work. For a number of authors, after a string of mass-market paperback first editions, they’ll see the series graduate to a hardcover release (as a consumer this kind of bugs me, as I prefer a matched set of books in a series, but I cannot fault an author for becomming popular)
No matter how successful genre imprints are with their respective fans, all this is just an aside:
Paperbacks didn’t destroy publishing. That is to say, the introduction and success of a cheaper, more accessable format did change the way publishers do business, but the core business remained the same, expanded to new customers and into new fields that once seemed unprofitable — not only were books pushed into new retail markets but the options available to existing book retailers were made more flexible and more responsive to customer demands — while also handing them new tools to compete in the expanded marketplace.
Now: digital books are a different critter from a cheaper format of physical books, if only because it seems that they can only be sold in the new marketplace (the internet) — but paperbacks were originally sold from newsstands (an extinct species of retailer for you readers younger than 30, but once a vital link in the overall publishing world) moved from there to racks in drug stores and grocery stores, and it took time for bookstores to adopt and embrace the format. I don’t know how an indy bookstore will sell e-books*, but if we figure out a way before all the indys go out of business, we’ll all be better off.
*and the extended aside:
there are many alternatives now, but some folks still prefer to shop at independent bookstores — and thank you — and part of that is the knowledge, attitude, and expertise of the independent bookseller. Maybe an indy can’t maintain a physical store in the new digital era, but the expertise doesn’t go away and only becomes more valuable as the number of choices increases. It’s possible that some future combination of blogger/bookseller will fill this gap — if they can wrangle a commission of sorts to compensate the time and effort needed — but this only addresses one aspect of bookselling and leaves in limbo the actual physical-books-on-shelves part of bookstores which is so appealing and compelling. I love the smell of books mingled with fresh brewed coffee and the ever so faint aroma of leather chairs and hardwood shelves. We’ll never get that from e-books unless we take our e-reader appliance into an old school bookstore. Maybe the common consumer doesn’t need this; I may be too nostalgic. But when all books are e- and even more of our work, lives, and reading takes place online, I’d be willing to bet a dollar or ten could be made by opening up a ‘reading room’ — not a place that sells books but a perfect place to read one. And it’ll look a lot like an independent bookstore.
[but that. . . is another essay]
I’d also like to make the point that
The ability to make lots of copies did (and does) benefit “pirates” — but for the first time also benefits consumers, as they can pirate it themselves without paying a professional “pirate” for an illegal copy.
So there is no economic incentive for old-business-model-piracy: even if you’d like to charge, someone else will undercut you by offering the same thing for free.
In the past, the ability to make more, cheaper copies almost always benefitted the creators and owners — after a period of adjustment. Mechanically Printed copies meant books could be sold by a publisher/creator for the first time (before that all copies were ‘illegal’ ‘pirated’ hand-copies of works) and the advent of the paperback (a cheaper, more convenient copy) lead to greater book sales overall. The first blush of online sales (Powells.com in 1994, Amazon in 1995) was a revolution in the sales and distribution of physical books, to the point where even if Amazon doesn’t claim to be the world largest bookseller, there is no other reasonable candidate for the title who doesn’t also sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of books online
Fifteen years later we’re still trying to figure out what online sales really means to publishers and publishing — and that’s in sales and distribution of physical books — digital copies of the same damn books are even more of a mystery.
But none of this is new. And I’d make the argument that the ability to make cheaper copies of a book has always, in the end, benefitted authors and publishers.
Before the printing press there were no ‘publishers’. Authors could achieve fame but could never make money off of their work. The technology changed that. Yes, after the introduction of mechanical printing, there were pirates. Yes, money was lost, and for centuries — but attribution remained intact (there was in fact money to be made in ensuring the author got proper credit, even as you steal his or her works) and eventually, creators got paid. (The companies set up to take advantage of creators got paid more, but maybe that is something we can fix this time ‘round.)
Before commercial printing: No Author Ever Got Paid. Everyone, from a first-time published novelist to Patterson, King, and Roberts, and on to the publishers that represent them, needs to double-check that fact — centuries ago, the only extant versions of a work were all pirated, hand-copied editions. No One got paid; the only impetus was the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.
If digital publication can be made to pay, in any way and in any small fraction, then it’s a vast improvement over 1400’s technology and even a damn sight better than the technology of 1850. No one got paid until the technology to make copies became so fast and cheap that guilt over the theft (with just a few laws also founded on guilt) finally overpowered the desire to read new works.
Dickens proved that touring is a valid profit model — not just for musicians but for authors. Twain made a fortune off of his writings, but also lost it, and to pay his debts also toured extensively. Both showed that a life of letters, and publication, has rewards that can be tapped for financial gain even if no money is made (or after money is made) in the initial sales of popular works. That is to say: both Dickens and Twain were able to cash in on their status as creators.
In this, at least, the new digital age makes attribution a core of the new piracy: sure, it’s a free copy but almost all pirates are most careful to properly tag and credit a file with the creator, year of publication or release, and technical info on how the file was encoded and compressed — else, the file has no ‘value’ to the sponges who are looking to download it for free. It’s perverse, when one actually considers it, but the long (and getting longer) file names on sharing sites speak to the need of a downloader to find “authentic” copies even when they know they are stealing.
So an illegal download is a lost sale, but also adds to one’s status as an author/creator of popular works — so popular that people steal them.
Eventually, the law (or more likely, a combination of law and new business models) will catch up to this new ability to make cheap copies. And eventually, as has happened before, we’ll all get paid.
And the best known (or creative) creators of works will still be able to make money on older publishing models, even as free copies predominate. Webcomics still sell print versions, even though the content is free. Bands tour, even though the songs are available on LimeWire, or for anyone to listen to on the radio. Even after we download a text file, occasionally we still print it out in hardcopy for convenience (or buy a book even after we’ve read the PDF).
The consumers’ use of works is complex, and takes into account more than just ‘free’. The consumers’ appreciation of works goes way past complex, to the point that we buy some content in multiple formats, pay good money for a one-time performance of works that we already know and own just because it’s ‘live’ (not always an improvement) and will buy other works by the same creator, even if they are inferior, because we loved the first one and hold out hope that eventually they will meet our expectations.
Touring is, in fact, the oldest publication model. [*ahem*] “Historically — pre-historically —if you had a song or a story and you wanted to share it, it involved a lot of personal commitment: you had to get out there and sell it. You had to perform it, actually, as there was no other way to make copies past telling another person and putting a copy in their head.”
Some current musical acts make all their profits from tours; record companies soak up so much of the profits from sales of recordings that the only way to make a living is to fall back on a 10,000 year old model, get out there, and perform.
Advertising isn’t a constitutionally guaranteed right, and it isn’t publishing either
Some of the problems with digital distribution of content (particularly video that was once broadcast over the public airwaves) are merely temporary, transitory disputes over ads.
Let Me State Here: Ads have nothing to do with distribution. Advertising is not a necessary part of publishing, and sponsors have no guaranteed rights of broadcast or access in any publishing, transmission, or distribution model — and even if some historical models were dependent on ads, that means nothing.
All Ads Are Spam. They persist only so far as the audience (us) are willing to forbear them. Yes, they seem ubiquitous, but that’s just because folks like money; advertisers extend money to creators, to place their message in places where their message would otherwise be grossly inappropriate.
Advertising was necessary to provide free (or significantly discounted) content back when there was no other way around the physical costs of producing, say, magazines and newspapers. One didn’t often find ads in paperbacks (except for publishers’ blurbs for other books) and if any literary press ever dared put an ad in a hardcover book this would be the first time I’ve ever heard of it.
The consumer was willing to pay full price for an ad-free book. So there wasn’t a need to sell ad space.
Newspapers, on the other hand, wanted to sell the evening edition for a nickel (or a penny) (in either case, a severe discount) so they had to accept advertising, and all sorts of ads: not just a full page or a half-page or a column, but all the way down to just 2 or 3 carefully abbreviated lines, sold to thousands of individuals and placed in a whole section by themselves.
The newspaper didn’t want to print classified ads, per se, but they certainly needed the revenue. And your local department store wasn’t interested necessarily in funding the Paris Bureau or making sure the city desk could send a reporter to every town hall, zoning meeting, education board, and political rally — but they wanted to get their ad in front of eyeballs and for a time newspapers were the most cost effective and locally-ubiquitous place to do that. Even after television, which was fine as a national platform, local advertisers still had few alternatives.
Just because the ad-dependent business model worked, and for decades, doesn’t mean it was the best business model. And now the internet is proving that the model has serious flaws. Moderately priced ads, and cheap copies for readers, were made possible by certain economies of scale. If you lose too many readers and lose that revenue source (even at close-to-free, all those nickels and pennies add up) then you have to make it up by charging both readers and advertisers more. But advertisers will balk at paying more for ads that reach fewer readers, and some readers will pause before spending $2 on a paper even though the cost (in real terms) is still nominal and likely closer to the inflation-adjusted dime or quarter they (or their grandfather) would have paid decades ago.
I pick on Newspapers because they seem furthest behind on adjusting to new technology. Yes, their role in our society is vital. Yes, we need an independent press and the comparative costs of print still make it cheaper than either radio and television, and the medium of print is still the most information-dense of any of the mass media…
At least it was, before, you know, hyper-text marked up pages where any word or image can in fact be a link to definitions, clarifications, asides & editorials, and more information (some of it free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer) on any topic that anyone else has bothered to write about. Don’t get that from newsprint.
Yes, journalistic intergrity and ethics in reporting are vital. Yes, editorial guidance and oversight in filtering all the world’s news into just what was most relevant given limited time on the part of readers was important. But now we can act as our own filters and editors. And integrity and ethics aren’t bound to the printed page, or guaranteed by it. The newspaper is important, and I hope they can adapt, but I’d also like to note that all papers were born of a time when a printing press was an investment one man could afford on his own, and the first publishers were also their own reporters — today, any blogger is just as entitled to assume the role of journalist. After a couple of centuries, our first publishing efforts may lead to a new public institution just as vital as the newspaper has become, but to completely discard out of hand the efforts of internet writers as amateurish and non-professional (which, admittedly a lot of it is) is the same as only looking at the history of newspapers from 1605 to 1700.
I’ve digressed a bit. To sum up: the combination of ads-plus-reportage worked for centuries but that doesn’t mean that journalism is dependent upon advertising, or that advertising is somehow vital to the delivery of news. It’s vital to some business models, but these models are not guaranteed. And there is nothing holy about cheap pulp broadsheets stained with soy-based inks. Something new, cheaper, and more versitile is coming — hell, it’s already here — and your old ad- and subscription-supported business may not work.
On the one hand, the new e-reader appliances could be the saving grace for some newspapers, as quite a few of us will be willing to pay for a newspaper-minus-the-paper that we can read on-screen, and that are delivered direct without the need to bookmark-and-click-and-navigate. In this case, yes, the editorial expertise and fine reporting is still worth money (I’ll even pay a premium for the London and other foreign english-language papers). But if I’m subscribing via this method, the very last thing I want is the ads. Dear Newspaper Owners: you needed ads to support massive presses, physical distribution, and other costs. I’m willing to forgo all that, if you are, and will pay more for what is an essentially free digital copy. But if an e-reader version of the paper I purchase has these old-business-model ads still embedded in it, you and your old business model can go rot. I won’t be buying.
The Illusion of Permanence, the Illusion of Ownership
Ironically, books from four centuries past (printed on vellum or parchment) will last longer and will in fact survive after the vast majority of books — those from the industrial age, printed on mass-produced pulp paper — have crumbled to dust.
Does this put Google’s effort to scan every last book they can get their hands on in a new light for you? It’s not about copyright; it shouldn’t be about who gets paid. Let’s get the damn things scanned as fast as we can before they’re *gone*. We can figure out who owns the digital copy, and who is owed what later. There are millions of books that are old enough that they may only survive being opened and read one last time; can we do our best to make sure that ‘last time’ also produces a new copy?
##
After I die — friendless, childless, drunk & alone — my vast collection of manga and other comics (and other books, too) will either be forgotten, or sold in bulk to a used bookstore, or sold at an estate auction to a least partially pay a lifetime of bar tabs, or perhaps donated to a library if I can plan that far ahead and can find a library that wants them. Yes, I owned [will own] them throughout my life, but after I am gone they will be released back into the public market — or left boxed and forgotten in some attic, or boxed and ruined in some leaky basement.
At best, my lifetime of reading will become part of a library collection, to live on, to enrich others in some very small, very fractional way. At worst, it’s all just so much landfill.
Every dollar I’ve spent has certainly enriched my life, though, and I regret none of it. I will stand proudly by my colection of books, and it will both succour and sustain me in my old age — thousands of fondly-remembered friends and stories, the physical artefacts serving as reminders of the tens of thousands of copies stored in my head, and occasionally pulled down and re-read to reinforce those memories.
Do I own the book? So long as I remember it, do I ‘own’ the story? Which is the real copy: the one on the shelf, or the one in memory? If the ‘hard-copy’ backup is a digital file rather than a bound collection of leaves, does that make my remembered version less valid?
Summing up
“Piracy”, as presently understood, has not only always been with us but at one point in time was also the primary publishing model: Hand-written copies of manuscripts in abbey libraries and private collections were once the only versions of printed works. Everything was in the Public Domain, every copy was either pirated or ‘fair use’ and the only one making money was the bookseller: if you had a copy and could distribute it, by walking around with it, then you might be able to sell it to someone who had never seen it before — maybe you parted with the original, maybe you rented out your copy so someone else could make another copy.
“Copy Rights” only followed when it became possible for a creator (or his agents, the first publishers) to make their own cheap copies. When every copy was expensive and dear, there was no market. No market = no business = no ‘right’ to make money on a non-existant business.
Cheaper and cheaper means of reproduction didn’t lead to the death of the industry; in fact cheap copies were at first the genesis of the book market, and later the introduction of even cheaper paperbacks lead to books reaching new markets, new genres getting publication for the first time, many non-book general retailers carrying books as part of their product mix, and eventually: the emergence in print of multiple formats of the same book at different price points, to reach the widest audience possible, and also greatly expanded book ownership in general. Books went from prized possessions (a single reader might own only a dozen) to a mass commodity so widespread that for many of us storage of excess books becomes a problem. They are no longer treasured, but instead are boxed and stored. And This Is a Good Thing, in my opinion.
Original works still have value. When we pay for a copy, we want an authentic version. Even if it’s a pirated copy, we want the “official” version, one that is as true to the original as possible.
Some works (i.e. the Mona Lisa) will always have value as a unique artefact no matter how many copies exist
Ads suck, and are an evil to be borne, not a business model to be emulated, and certainly not a guaranteed part of the transmission of knowledge in either the historical or business sense.
For the first time ever: “piracy”, that is the say the sharing and distribution of copies, is now free to the end consumer without the need to pay a fee to an intermediary.
Wait, did I say for the first time?
Well, sure, only if we exclude those who read magazines and newspapers in bookstores without paying for them (and who have done so for decades), those who lend books (and who have lent books for centuries), and those who visited libraries to do research and read the transmitted knowledge of the past, a practice that has been both legal, free (after the not-insubstantial transportation costs), and encouraged for millennia. We all carry copies of works in memory; a ‘good enough’ copy in our head. What is called piracy in some circles is called use — not always fair use, but use all the same — in most others. My point is not to defend piracy as piracy — but to point out that historically, and more importantly, sharing is usually a good thing.
Until the music industry can stop people from reading magazines in the bookstore without paying for them — affecting my bottom line, as a bookseller — I don’t want to hear jack from the RIAA about how piracy is ruining their business. Boo hoo, people steal music.
You guys have had twelve decades to figure this out: from sheet music to player piano rolls to wax cylinders to radio broadcasts to cassette tapes to digital downloads — and each time some engineer comes up with a new way to transmit copies of music you go into an apoplectic fit and insist it’ll kill your business, and you sue the hell out of anyone and everyone, and each time you rebound and make even more money. Just shut up.
Print media is facing the same issue now, and while some may claim that digital copies (e-books and their close cousins) are brand new and present brand new challenges — it’s all still about copies, and distribution, and readers.
Distribution used to mean caravan & pack mule, or trireme & caravel, or clipper ships & windjammers, or steam ship & rails, or newsboys & horse-drawn carts, or delivery van & the postal service, or some combination of all of these that got a book or newspaper to your door. The cost of print copies (like the cost of all goods that can be mass produced) has always gone down. While the cost of distribution has decreased less steadily, there are also downward pressures that have brought transit costs incrementally down as well.
The internet combines the two and dials it up to eleven: now the cost of making a copy and distributing it world-wide is little more than the price of admission: once you’re on the internet the rest seems free.
This is the new bit. Past that, it’s all just publishing, and by that I don’t mean 1960s business models but the whole world and historical context of publishing from Homer to Virgil to Dante to Franklin to Dickens to Twain to Hearst to Lane to Bezos — and yeah, I’m mixing my metaphors & models freely — but what’s so different from a poet of pre-Hellenic Greece (i.e. a reporter of his day) relating a battle that even in his time occurred centuries past, and a modern blogger writing an essay on, say, the difference between ownership, authorship, and the illusion of business models in publishing in relation to the contemporary profligation of works:
We both do what we can to get the word out. Neither looks to make a buck; both just want to be read, and remembered.
##
And now, the sticky bit. I’ll admit: I pulled Plato into the subject line just because it sounded good, and I thought I’d be able to make some profound statements about Form vs. Content vs. Original Works vs. Copies. And maybe I have. I lack the chops to push the point past a drive-by reference.
But there are problems, not least of which is that what Plato called Form I’d define in modern terms as Content, and the concept of perfect copies likely never occurred to any of the ancient Greeks; in fact their ‘copies’ are almost always depicted as imperfect iterations of an exemplary, philosophical Ideal.
If there is an Ideal, I can copy it and have it up on usenet, p2p networks, and as a torrent in 5 minutes flat.
##
The world has changed: There are six billion of us where there used to be a scant six million, and more folks are on the internet today than were even alive when the poet known to us as Homer first started talking about Helen, Paris, Hector and Achilles.
Old models have broken. New models are being found.
Past that, I can’t say — but maybe I’ve been able to lend you some perspective you didn’t have before.
Just trolling your site. I was wondering if you knew of any publicly traded manga, anime or standalone distribution companies like KDE, or Del Ray (but they are a subsidiary of Random House). Or, if you know of any companies that are venture capital, or angel funding? And if you don’t, could you point me in the right direction?
Thanks for the business analysis. Considering the vastness of the internet there doesn’t seem to be enough research done on this industry. Of course should I use your research, you would be properly sited.
Regards,
[redacted]
I’m not sure how much help I can provide, but here it goes anyway:
Right now, most manga and anime companies fall into one of two groups — a wholly owned subsidiary of a much larger conglomerate, or privately held firms most of which are so small they don’t even have to report earnings if they don’t want to.
To further cloud the issue, even the independent manga companies often have distribution (or co-publishing) agreements with one or another of the large publishers — for example Viz is co-owned by Japanese firms Shogakukan and Shueisha, but is incorporated as an stand-alone American company, and is distributed to bookstores by Simon & Schuster (which in turn is owned by CBS)
An incomplete list of Manga Co’s:
ADV Manga [defunct]
Aurora Publishing — including the LuvLuv and Deux imprints
Broccoli Books [defunct] CMX (a division of DC’s Wildstorm imprint)
Dark Horse
Del Rey (as you know, an imprint of Random House)
Digital Manga — including the DMP, DMP Juné, 801, and DokiDoki imprints
Go! Comi
Graphic Sha
Japanime’s Manga University — which has also co-published a number of Graphic Sha titles
Media Blasters
Netcomics
Seven Seas (distributed now by Macmillan imprint Tor — it’s unclear if future releases will be co-branded with Tor or if 7seas will continue as a separate brand)
Udon
Vertical
Orbit/Yen Press (an imprint of Hachette)
[edit: oops. I forgot Central Park Media (defunct), DrMaster, and Yaoi Press — and possibly others: shout out in the comments, peeps!]
Tokyopop — which includes the Blu imprint; distributed by HarperCollins, and also co-publishing manga adaptations of Harper Teen titles under a joint HC/Tokyopop imprint
& Viz — which includes Shojo Beat, Shonen Jump & Shonen Jump Advanced, Viz Signature & Sig Ikki, the Ghibli Studio Library, and the Vizkids imprint.
There are plenty of links in these articles, and of course while wikipedia has faults you can teach yourself quite a bit about the industry just by plugging in names and reading the wiki articles.
I’m not as familiar with the anime industry; I’m a bookseller.
##
To your second question: If you are trying to secure funding, the first and most important thing is to narrow your concept, and figure out what you can do best — what you will do differently. Back that up with a solid business plan: Write a plan just like you were going to walk into a small community bank and ask them for a loan to set up business in their home town — that is to say, don’t load it down with hypotheticals and market projections but plainly describe what your business is and how (in simple and concrete terms) you will make money.
And set the business plan to one side, for now.
Parallel to that, prepare a sales pitch. Here, you can go Blue Sky and Outside of the Box and New Paradigm all you want. This is how you will approach VC or other investors to get them interested in your business model.
Once you have their interest, you can then move to close the deal. After the initial burst of enthusiasm, when they begin to have second thoughts (or the lawyers and MBA’s start to talk them out of it) you can back up a stellar sales pitch with the boring, nuts-and-bolts business plan. “Angels” and VC are still businessmen — they’re still banks, after a fashion. They are willing to take greater risks (for greater returns) and can often be persuaded to back interesting ideas that might not, at first glance, make business sense — but realize that they are very much interested in the business, particularly in the post-dot-com era. The money isn’t going to be as ‘free’ as it used to be.
The only other advice I can give is to note that venture capital is still very much tied to the technology sector. You’d do yourself a favor to move to either Silicon Valley or Cambridge, Mass. even if your business has nothing to do with tech — most Angels made their money in the dot-com boom (the smart ones got out early) and it helps to go where the money is.
best of luck
—Matt.
[post script: I spent an hour responding, and thought I’d recoup the effort by also getting this post out of it.]
As fans, our world is owned. Our participation in the process is necessary, and we can vote with our wallets, but no matter how many books, collectibles, variant covers, movie tickets, or DVDs we buy, we don’t own anything. The actual owners aren’t fans, and sometimes the actual owners aren’t the best custodians of the property, but most media conglomerates are in the business to make money — at least in the long run, and it’s our money they’re counting on — so more often than not we come to some kind of mutual understanding.
It doesn’t always work out, in the short term. Ironically, the most money is made when creative types are allowed to be creative, when stories are told about characters and not “properties” and when Business is in fact the last consideration of the business. It’s hard to teach this to lawyers and executives, though, no matter how many examples and great works we throw in their faces — there’s always some weaselly excuse (“Our Marketing was Great!” “We leveraged the property to meet the market demand for this kind of comics project according to our projections and estimates!”) that has nothing to do with the actual movie, when both Occam’s Razor and any ticket buyer will give you the simplest explanation: we like good stories. Projects made with care (particularly movies) are best when the point, main focus, and the directed efforts of many professionals is to tell a compelling story, first. Down this path lies greatness; not only do the fans gush but the critics weigh in with their snobby, backhanded complements (but still complements) and the general public (you know, the ones not invested emotionally in the characters) respond as well — because we all like good stories. (I’ll cite the most recent Batman and Star Trek movies to support this)
Just going through the motions, or larding in decades of continuity for the sake of continuity, or trying to go ‘dark’ just because it works with Batman (hint: his parents were killed and he hunts criminals by night; the suprising thing is that the comics could ever be ‘light’), or on the other side: completely ignoring all past continuity because we need a kid sidekick, or some vehicles that can be sold as toys, or a love interest who’ll die in act 3, or because the character is a psychopath but the studio demands a PG13 rating…
The point of those two comma-spliced sentence fragments is that Changes made because of Business always fail; Changes made in service of Story more often succeed. Because what we’re buying are the stories; we buy soundtracks and figures because they remind us of the stories, we buy books (graphic & otherwise) obviously, we line up on a Friday night no matter how many times we’ve been burned before because few things pack an emotional punch like 135 minutes of carefully written, filmed and edited Story. The use of a comics character in this context is the warm embrace of the familiar added on to a Really Nice Night Out. It’s a date. When it goes bad, when expectations are rudely and roundly thwarted by a studio that doesn’t know better, it’s like a blind date from hell — or that one awkward date where you both (or worse, just one of you) are just going through the motions, and that ends with the breakup.
Three paragraphs on comics movie adaptations are off-topic — though given the recent moves on the part of both major studios (Disney/Marvel and DC Entertainment) perhaps movies are the new topic — and 750 words of intro (tonight, at least) aren’t the article.
As much as I like pounding corporations for neglecting the Art in favour of chasing the ever elusive Dollar (and everything that statement encompasses) in fact the point of this drunken diatribe isn’t this distasteful part of the business, and as much as I like to promote Story (your corporate ambitions and maybe even a lawyer or two should be sacrificed on the altar of Story) what I intended to write about this evening is this matter of ownership.
Recent business news has reminded us: no matter how much we love these characters, and the backstory, and the origins (retconned and otherwise), and the multiverses and the space empires and realms of dream, magic, antimatter, funhouse-mirror-reflections, and Captain Carrot — The places we know like home, the words we know by heart, the icons and archetypes we recognise on sight — after all we have invested, both with our money and of ourselves, these Worlds of Wonder are still owned, entire, by the Company.
##
The question is *which* company, and increasingly, there are fewer and fewer of them.
Let’s go back 15 months, to my last yearly review post (hint: it was for 2007) where I posted a publisher’s index, basically a who-owns-what and why it matters.
After listing the top six publishers (then, as now: Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan — and Time Warner, but Time Warner was an add-on, and only gets a nod because of DC: their other [book] publishing is not only miniscule but was, in largest part, sold to Hachette in 2006) I then listed another dozen or so companies also of note.
And actually, I listed each not by the names you know, but by corporate ownership, which introduces some American fans to names like Lagardere, Bertelsmann, and Holtzbrink — and others that you know but prehaps never knew the connections of, like News Corp’s ownership of HarperCollins.
In that listing, Disney went under the “Big, but not comics” heading; Marvel was under “Comics, but not big”.
* past that statement, I make no claims as to having seen the Disney/Marvel deal coming.
Let me back up a half-step and consider that exception I made for Time Warner. Even considering DC Comics and the not-insubstantitial magazine business, they are hardly a publisher of note when it comes to books — but they still merit a listing in any sort of top ten because they’re Time Warner and “media” have overtaken and subsumed books both as a business, and in the mind and eye of the consumer.
The last really good look at this was Douglas Rushkoff’s “The Merchants of Cool” on Frontline (PBS) — and even then, the best information is not in the program itself, but was posted as a footnote to the Frontline website — though the information presented is now 8 years old, their summary is still the best out there. (btw: the whole “Merchants of Cool” program is posted for free viewing on Google Video — and I include the link with a smirk as this is “new media” and didn’t even exist when the Frontline documentary first aired) (if you have 50 minutes you should watch or re-watch this)
There are 10 Big Media firms, but we’re not stopping there (and I’ve always been a bit leary of Top 10 lists; it smacks of laziness, or something some drunk blogger could post on his days off) because even a smidge of research into the top 10 immediately suggests the 11th (& a 12th), and past the big media conglomerates there are 3 additional book publishers worthy of citation also.
So here’s a Media top 11 and a Publisher top 12. I leave the exact rankings (and figuring out which is which) as an exercise for the reader; they’re presented below initially in alphabetical order, with my additions on the end.
##
Bertelsmann website & wiki
Privately held, unlisted. Incorporated in Germany.
owns: Random House, a lot of stuff in Europe you’ve never heard of
of Note: Random House is the world’s largest trade book publisher; among other things they publish Del Rey Manga and several Comics of note (Maus, Persepolis, Asterios Polyp) under the Pantheon imprint; as recently announced they are Kodansha’s US distribution partner.
Reported Revenue: more than €16 Billion — of which ~10% is Random House.
CBS website & wiki
publicly traded on the NYSE as CBS.
owns: CBS, duh; Showtime, a 50% chunk of mini-network The CW, a buncha TV & Radio stations, and Simon & Schuster
of Note: Simon & Schuster distributes Viz
Reported Revenue: $14 Billion — of which $850 Million were attributed to ‘publishing’
Disney website & wiki
publicly traded (NYSE: DIS)
owns: ABC, ESPN, rights to Kermit and most of the other Muppets, 17% of Florida, a third of Hulu, enough congressmen to keep Mickey under perpetual copyright, the frozen corpse of Walt, Hyperion Books… & pending regulator approval and by the end of the year, Disney will also own Marvel.
of Note: Past Marvel? Hyperion. Pixar. Muppets. Sportscenter. The rest is dross.
Reported Revenue: $37.8 Billion (the addition of Marvel, if the purchase had been completed prior to 2008, would have bumped that up to $38.5 Billion)
Hachette website & wiki
a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardere SCA, incorporated in France
owns: Little, Brown & Co., the oldest (founded 1937) part of Hachette Book Group USA, a bunch of stuff in Europe, and multiple Jet Fighter factories (also in Europe, but these are jets: you’re in range, fanboy)
of Note: Yen Press,
Reported Revenue: Lagardere reports sales of €8.2 Billion, of which a shade under €2.2 Billion are from ongoing publishing operations
Macmillan website & wiki
The Macmillan moniker was recently resurrected for their English-language units: owned by Holtzbrink, a privately-held German investment group
owns: St. Martins, Henry Holt & Co, Farrar Straus & Giroux
of Note: First Second, Tor (Sci-fi and genre fiction, and which has emerged as a most excellent blog, go see; also recently allied with Seven Seas for manga and more)
Reported Revenue: (from 2007) €2.5 Billion, of which €630 Million came from publishing and €521 Million was attributed to the North American market
NBC Universal website & wiki NBCU is relatively new; this is the media merger you didn’t hear about. The new company is 80% owned by General Electric (the long-time owner of NBC et al.) and 20% owned by Vivendi SA (which was Vivendi Universal before the deal, and which still owns the Universal Music Group, Canal+, and Activision Blizzard; all of which were not included in the ’04 deal — I might go so far as to say Vivendi kept all the cool stuff, and hell, we should give Vivendi SA the 11th spot on this list)
owns: NBC & Universal Studios, duh; Olympic broadcasts in the US through 2012, MSNBC, Telemundo and mun2 [that’s ‘mundos’ for us gringos], Bravo, USA Networks, SyFy [that’s Sci-Fi for us who haven’t been brain-stapled], the Universal Studios Parks, and a third of Hulu.
Of note: um. Queer Eye For Straight Guy? and as noted above.
Reported Revenue: Per the GE 2008 AR, NBCU accounts for scant %10 or so of GE’s total earnings, or $17 Billion of the $183 Billion total
News Corp website & wiki
Still 40% owned by Rupert Murdoch, publicly traded as NWS on NASDAQ; other classes of stock available there, on the ASX (Australia) and LSE (London)
Owns: Fox (all iterations: network, cable, movie studio, a third of Hulu), Myspace, Death ray mounted on the Moon, HarperCollins
of Note: HarperCollins is our distributor for Tokyopop, the HarperCollins Teen imprint co-publishes some of Tokyopop’s most popular original titles (Warriors cat-sorta-manga and the Vampire Kisses adaptations)
Reported Revenue: $30 Billion — of which $1.1 Billion is due to publishing.
Pearson PLC website & wiki
publicly traded on the London (LSE: PSON) and New York (NYSE: PSO) exchanges
Owns: Penguin (the Penguin Group is the second largest publisher on the planet), The Financial Times (and it’s associated brands and websites), and Pearson Education (which you’ve never heard of but if you went to school have most certainly read
of Note: GN adapations from Philomel (an imprint of Penguin), Comics encyclopedias and other guides from DK.
Reported Revenue: Pearson reports sales of £4.8 billion, of which 20% is Penguin — and 60% are textbooks, study guides, and other educational material
Sony website & wiki
ownership: Sony is one of those fun byzantine conglomerates I referenced in the recent Kodansha post; most applicable in this context is the Sony Pictures unit (website & wiki); Sony trades on the Nikkei and on the NYSE under SNE
owns: 100% of what used to be Sony BMG (they bought out Bertelsmann and folded the company into their other music businesses) also, Animax Japan, the SET and AXN families of cable channels (almost entirely outside the US), Columbia Pictures and Columbia Tristar.
Of note: PS2, PS3, PSP, Blu-ray — Geeky, but Not Comics
Reported Revenue: The Sony Mothership reports revenue of ¥7,730 Billion — which sounds like a whole lot (and is in fact a whole lot) but converts to the smaller-seeming $83.8 Billion. Sony Pictures amounts to a tenth of that at ¥717.5 Billion ($7.8 Billion at current conversion rates)
Time Warner website & wiki
publicly traded (NYSE: TWX)
owns: 50% of The CW, Cartoon Network, (and other Turner cable channels) DC Comics, Vertigo, Mad Magazine, and duh: Time Magazine publishing operations & the various Warner movie, movie studio, cable, and network TV operations.
of Note: Batman, Superman, et. al. (not that they have any idea how to ‘leverage’ these) (which may be a good thing); also: CMX, which I’d previously described as “such an outlier (the furthest colonial outpost, as it were) and running so far beneath the corporate radar that they can actually release good stuff.”
Reported Revenue: Total revenues of $46.9 Billion, of which $25.8 Billion was ‘subscription’ revenue (which includes cable fees and AOL subscribers) — and an aside & editorial: it’s interesting that Time Warner separates this stream from the content that produces it, and conflates it with the $15-25 bucks a month they’re scamming from AOL users. HBO subscribers are different from AOL, the fees TW charges to cable providers for ‘free’ channels like CNN and Cartoon Network are different from the ‘premium’ content of HBO, and the acquisition of a channel by a consumer (no matter how it is done) can’t always be considered separate from the content served through that channel — but this is a much larger debate. [TW is right in a business sense in this case but otherwise wrong in how they approach the business.] Less than a quarter is attributed to “content” (again, the wrong way to look at the business, as the content drives the rest) which encompasses the entirety of cable TV programming, movies, magazines, web articles, publishing, and comics — not that TW wants to talk about comics; I mean, they’ll talk for three pages about the Siegel lawsuit and mention DC in a dozen different contexts as property owned and available to other TW units, but the seed and root of all these other revenue streams gets the same two sentences this year as last, and the year before: “DC Comics, wholly owned by the Company, publishes a wide array of graphic novels and an average of over 90 comic book titles per month, featuring such popular characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Sandman. DC Comics also derives revenues from motion pictures, television, videogames and merchandise.” (We’ll have to wait for the 2009-2010 AR to see if the “DC Entertainment” move and re-org actually changes anything in either the Warner Bros. unit or Time Warner as a whole.) No matter how fine they parse it, TW still admits that “content” generates $11 Billion — 23% of their total.
Vivendi SA website & wiki
Trades on Euronext Paris under VIV
owns: (as noted) Universal Music Group, Activision Blizzard, some European stuff
Of note: Blizzard has a sum total of three properties — Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo — any one of which is a license to print money; and World of Warcraft has 11.5 million subscribers, more than the populations of Greece, Cuba, or Belgium — more than the populations of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland combined — or more than 150 other sovereign nations and I’m not sure what this says about world politics.
Reported Revenue: €25 Billion. (60% which is just the French operations.) To put a punctuation mark on the discussion of Blizzard’s success, they scored a scant $2 Billion of the overall company revenue; less than 10% — but also, that’s two Big Bills for a PC (not console) software company.
Publishing’s Smaller Fry:
McGraw-Hill
owns: Business Week, Standard & Poor’s, a huge text book division (see $6+ billions below). (But No Comics)
Reported Revenue: $6.4 Billion
Scholastic website & wiki
Scholastic is the exception that proves rules are useless; they publish Harry Potter— ‘nuf said. Compared to other publishers Scholastic is the kids’ division that is the whole damn company.
Of note is their Graphix imprint, home to the colour reprints of Jeff Smith’s Bone — which is perhaps most important, but they also have Amulet, the Baby-Sitters Club adaptations, & Queen Bee (which is about as ‘manga’ a graphic novel—in terms of plot and character design—as I’ve seen come out the states).
Reported Revenue: $1.85 Billion
##
RocketBomber.com: “We read boring corporate reports so you don’t have to! ™”
But I can only do so much: for more information on publishing I’d like to point you to the Monthly reports from publishers.org and for more information on media conglomerates, you should check out all the ‘website’ and ‘wiki’ links above, and also the PBS Frontline and The Nation articles first referenced.
Trying to get word out of Kodansha on the matter, though, is a lot more difficult. They’re not talking. They don’t even have a website: some cybersquatter has staked out Kodansha-USA and KodanshaComics and a different cybersquatter picked up the old and seldom (perhaps never?) used KodanClub site
Not that all is silence:
Kodansha Intl. (last updated 31 Aug) now reflects that affiliate Kodansha America, LLC will be responsible for sales and marketing, though distribution of Kodansha-Intl. titles is still being carried out by Oxford University Press.
It’s worthwhile to note that Kodansha International Ltd. is based in Japan; Kodansha America, LLC is one of three new companies set up in the United States. (The new Kodansha U.S. Manga initiative has always been separate from this chunk of Kodansha’s overall business.)
Filing Date Name Type Entity Name SEP 16, 1988 Actual KODANSHAINTERNATIONAL (USA – NEWYORK) LTD. DEC 12, 1988 Actual KODANSHAINTERNATIONAL (USA) LTD. JUL 19, 1990 Actual KODANSHAAMERICA, INC.
JUL 01, 2008 Actual KODANSHAUSA, INC. JUL 01, 2008 Actual KODANSHAUSAPUBLISHING, LLC JUL 01, 2008 Actual KODANSHAAMERICA, LLC
The 1 July public filing date (accompanied by appropriate press releases) was the first official word on K-USA — though inital reports via anonymous user comments on posts at Comics212 and The Beat had started the rumour mill, um, milling about 4 weeks before.
21 years ago Kodansha thought the potential was there for some of their (non-manga) titles, translated, to make inroads into the North American market (and likely was doing so previous to the formal establishment of a NY company & office) and then last year they thought enough of the potential for the comics to sink a couple million bucks and to get the ball rolling on a full scale(?) American Manga division of their own.
Also last year, Kodansha set up a slate of new companies and starting working (behind the scenes, but also presumably full-time, and in earnest) on a new American strategy…
And now, 14 months later, news comes that Kodansha has pulled it’s licenses from Tokyopop — hot on the heels of an announcement that they’ll be using long-time partner Random House for US distribution. And just six weeks from now, the first books will hit retailers.
Six Weeks? Yes.
Oh, hey… following the announcement of the Kodansha/RH distro deal, did anyone else think to search Random House’s site? Apparently, the imprint will be known (at least internally at RH) as “Kodansha Comics”.
Akira vol 1
Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
On Sale: October 13, 2009
Price: $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-935429-00-5 (1-935429-00-0)
Akira vol 2
Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
On Sale: January 12, 2010
Price: $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-935429-02-9 (1-935429-02-7)
Akira vol 3
Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
On Sale: April 13, 2010
Price: $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-935429-04-3 (1-935429-04-3)
Ghost in the Shell vol 1
Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
On Sale: October 13, 2009
Price: $26.99 ISBN: 978-1-935429-01-2 (1-935429-01-9)
Ghost in the Shell vol 2
Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
On Sale: April 13, 2010
Price: $26.99 ISBN: 978-1-935429-03-6 (1-935429-03-5)
##
Kodansha is playing it safe: not only are Akira and Ghost in the Shell older titles with a proven track record and North American sales history, each also has versions available on DVD (many versions in the case of GitS) which are also proven fan favorites with their own sales numbers to back them up. They had to screw over their oldest American partner (it’s unfair of me to ask, but: is this a contributing factor, as to why Dark Horse suddenly finds themselves the custodians of so much of CLAMP’s catalogue?) and actually, Kodansha may be doing themselves a disservice if they’re using these two legacy titles to guage American consumer demand for manga, but imagine yourself in Kodansha’s place — with a lot of newer titles tied up in more recent licensing agreements and the Del Rey deals in place actually making money for both sides — which titles would you launch with?
##
The Kodansha has Landed.
why are we so excited?
Kodansha moved into manga publishing with the launch of Shukan Shonen Magazine in 1959. This weekly anthology for boys went on to become one of the top-selling titles in Japan, with a circulation of almost 2 million copies (2007). Addressing every gender and age group, many of Kodansha’s manga magazines now belong to the so-called “megacomic” category, selling hundreds of thousands of copies on a regular basis. Whether it’s Rival, aimed at junior high school kids, Bessatsu Friend, for high school girls, or Young Magazine, designed for the youth market, Kodansha’s comic magazines cover every major demographic.
Kodansha currently publishes 18 manga magazines and around 1,270 manga trade paperback titles annually. [link]
[please note, by their own reporting Kodansha publishes 2000 titles a year — so manga is roughly 2/3 of their total output.]
1200 manga tankobon annually is roughly the entire output of all US licensees back in 2006 — it’s been up and down (and down) a bit since then. So when we talk about Kodansha-US-Direct, we’re talking about the potential to double the amount of manga available to American otaku — not overnight, obviously, as K-USA has been in the works for a couple of years already — but that’s the potential.
Kodansha USA is like a big black box.
A closed box; but not quite a featureless mononlith: it seems to incorporate a recycled PC speaker, has a single red LED on the outside, and a mysterious barely visible seam towards the top that hints at a lid but which can’t be proven to be a means of access because to date all the damn box has done is sit there.
We know it has a sound chip because every now and then, it beeps. And then nothing. And the light comes on and turns back off, or at least some blogger reported that the LED blinked but I didn’t see that myself, I’m just repeating what the first guy said.
And we all suspect that something wonderful is in the box because The Kodansha in Japan has some great stuff that they’ve been selling the heck out of (in Japan) and us fat, razy Americans would certainly like some of that too. We’ve seen some Kodansha releases in English, obviously, but in our heart of hearts we know it’s all been like the supermarket sushi — yes, it is ‘sushi’ but the expectation is that if a Japanese sushi master opened a restaurant next door to the supermarket we could finally get a taste of the real thing.
Mmmm. Sushi. I can almost taste it…
That is the promise and potential of Kodansha USA. But so far we’re not geting a sushi lunch, or Kodansha-direct manga, unless they’re sitting inside the un-openable black box. Kodansha USA is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma surrounded by sushi rice, nori, and served with wasabi and gari.
##
Mixed (and confusing) metaphors aside…
It could be that Kodansha USA is only going to do premium reprints of older, established titles — this assumption is certainly in line with the only titles released so far. It could be that K-USA is going to skip licensees entirely and release their own stuff to North America direct — which is what their (Japanese) press release last year seemed to say, and of course there is the recent Tokyopop development, but which has been at least partly disproven by every Del Rey and Dark Horse Kodansha title announced in the year since. It could be that this seemed like a really good idea in 2007 but the couple years in between has since convinced Kodansha to scale back or delay their plans for the indefinite future.
Could be a lot of things. That’s why I describe Big K as a big black box. We can assume all kinds of things, based on the market or our experience, or what we overhear at a book expo [*cough*] but in the end until we get official word from Kodansha—or we have the books in our hands—past the most general of statements [Kodansha is coming] there is nothing that we can actually say about this move.
There is only one thing we can say, the same thing we knew more than a year ago: Kodansha is coming.
According to Books in Print, the Kodansha America website is:
http://www.kodanshaamerica.com/
which has NO information about Akira or Ghost In The Shell.
I think your assumptions about their strategy are misguided. Kodansha cannot start established series from scratch until Tokyopop sells out of their remaining stock. Starting with established titles allows stores to order with some confidence, which helps KA start this new line. It is possible that there are few Kodansha properties which are unlicensed, and with the Tokyopopped letter, they can start planning to print their own volumes, but it will take at least six months (more with translation) before we see new titles.
Kodansha’s oldest American partner would be either Oxford (their U.S. distributor of Japanese titles (ISBNs starting with 4-) or Random House, which has licensed titles from Kodansha.
It seems that RH is distributing, so Kodansha manga will not be an imprint. (In much the same way that DC Comics and Titan Books are not imprints of RH.)
Yeah, it’s an interesting box. Not as interesting as that other box with the Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man stickers on it…
(and first: I may get to Mickey/Marvel before the end of the week, but everyone else is doing a fine job in the interim — my thoughts are not necessary, to date)
Like many Asian conglomerates, Kodansha is not set up as single, huge corporation (i.e. Disney) but rather a network of affiliated companies; of interest to us are the publishing-related firms, but per the site linked above: “Kodansha has further affiliates in industries like publishing, printing, paper broking, logistics and real estate.” The whole is so much bigger than the manga-intellectual-properties parts.
Books in Print™ — a hallowed and much respected source for titles (and companies) in English, fails us when it comes to piercing the veil of any Japanese publisher.
The site you link to is Kodansha, Intl. Ltd. And that’s fine. But K-Intl. is different from K-USA as currently set up and different from Big-K, Japan (who owns all the others).
And in reference to my citation in the post above of previous long standing RH-Kodansha ties, I wasn’t talking about Del Rey but as linked, to Random House Kodansha Co. Ltd, the independent firm (co-owned by both) established in 2003 to bring Random House titles translated into Japanese to the Japanese market.
Dark Horse didn’t start licensing Kodansha titles until 1994 (ref.) — a scant 15 years ago or so — so maybe I should have qualified my statement by saying Kodansha was screwing over their longest-standing manga partner, and I thank you for the opportunity to post the correction.
[Oxford deserves notice, and credit, and in fact appears to still be the partner for the academic & noteworthy books of Kodansha Intl. — but today we’re talking about comics] [And Dark Horse is still publishing Oh My Goddess! so it seems the new Kodansha USA isn’t messing with all previous business relationships, just T’pop]
In America, a Publishing firm is more likely to set up an imprint (a semantic unit) to try out a new idea. —it’s less about business arrangements, and all about marketing the ‘new thing’ to the public.
In Asia (a point I made last year) the model is to instead set it up as a new company — owned in whole or in part by the mothership but set up to fail or to succeed on their own.
I can buy a Yahama receiver for my home entertainment system. I can buy a Yamaha saxophone. I can buy a Yamaha motorcycle — these are all Yamaha but in fact there are 3 separate companies selling me these disparate goods. I picked Yamaha because I know these product lines off the top of my head (and own both the receiver and the sax) but many Japanese firms (and at least one Korean co.: Samsung) are set up on very similar lines.
SO Kodansha as-a-name-and-brand is monolithic, but the individual companies doing business in their name are not so coherent as the single brand (and our experience with American, UK, and European publishers) would lead us to expect.
Which is why this is called a Kodansha Puzzle. What I find interesting is that Kodansha USA Inc. or Kondansha Publishing USALLC (whichever is actually responsible) in the arrangement with Random House would like the books to be branded “Kodansha Comics”
—I mean, they could just have easily asked for “Kodansha USA” or “Kodansha Del Rey” or even “Kodansha”-no-modifier. Which is why I made a note of it above. I call it an “imprint” out of habit, maybe — after all, I’ve spent a few weeks trying to untangle Villard from Pantheon from Del Rey from Ballantine Doubleday Dell.
Honestly, unwrapping US publishers is enough to drive me to drink, and I’m already at drink (I own a condo here) so compounding US publishers foibles with intentional Kodansha obfuscations is enough to drive me to… I don’t know… hard liquor? bad poetry? non-profit activism?
I’m still waiting for Kodansha Manga USA (whatever co. releases it) and I’d love an easy answer, almost as much as I’d love to be able to just buy the manga (I’m a simple guy: readily available beer and manga are enough to shut me up.) But in the absence of the easy buy or easy explanation — or even a complex explanation if it’s something I can figure out — all we are left with is a lot of guesses and the Damn Black Box.
If I were a spiteful, mean-spirited person with little forgiveness for the occasional foibles of others and no generosity at all in my soul, I might point out that even half-assed internet journalism consists of, at a minimum: finding links to original sources, writing full articles on your own blog (or emailing enough info to a blogger-of-record so they can post) (or posting a full article with links and attribution in one of the several well-trafficked-forums under your own damn name or an ‘official’ handle/alias), and following a story past the dropping-an-Oh-By-The-Way-rumor-in-the-comments-of-someone-else’s-blog stage.
— but a comment isn’t journalism; it’s… well… OK so a comment is not nothing as some comments are both insightful and corrective (Matt Thorn’s comments on my “Ages of Fan” posts spring immediately to mind) but I’m reminded more of a chimpanzee flinging poo than anything else in this particular case.
Sorry for the long digressive intro, folks: tweaking Chthulu into a pique is a little hobby of mine, and I’m trying to taunt the punter into leaving another rambling, illogical, nonsensical comment — something where she (he? it?) insults me once again without providing anything to back up either the original claims or any sort of authority from which she might be speaking. So far — past the one exceptional, glorious fact which can be corroborated — Chthulu is full of shit.
The One Fact is that Kodansha is coming.
##
There have been some developments since the orignal bomb and my initial follow-up — let’s start with some changes at Kodansha Mothership in Japan: at The Kodansha there are two main points to note; first and most importantly, licensing is still a bit part of their business, not just here in the States but internationally. Even if the new initiative results in fewer NA licensees, it’s not like BigK is going to stop a business practice that, after all, results in money gained for absolutely no effort.
(That’s the main point, methinks. Nothing is wrong with licensing; it’s free money. If you sell a license, you get cash up front and your partner assumes all risk — The only reason to try Going It Alone is that there is even more money to be made if one invests the time and effort into producing the books or DVDs directly — but like any investment, returns are not guaranteed.)
With an established US market for manga, and seven solid years (or 16, or 20, or 25 — depending on how one cares to account for things like Mixx, Animerica, and Akira) of groundwork already laid, and with the library of titles available to Kodansha, this is an excellent time to enter the market.
You question that? “Oh, we’re in a depression” – “Oh, the bookstore market is shrinking” – “Oh, the Direct Market is entering meltdown, there’s no way a new publisher could enter now”
The second point worth more than a second glance is found on the current org chart for BigK — in addition to the twoexisting English-language affiliates (though did they ever do anything with the KodanClub brand?) there are two new companies: Kodansha USA, Inc. & Kodansha USA Publishing, LLC — and of course Random House Kodansha Co. Ltd. is still a going concern,
and as an aside: this loosely affiliated network of separate companies seems to be a typical asian model for corporate organization; consider Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Samsung as examples
I guess what I’m trying to say is that a Japanese publisher setting up a new company is comparable to a US publisher setting up a new imprint [mostly semantic] and it’s as natural a process as me ‘producing’ empty glass and aluminium containers for recycling — just a natural part of doing business.
—that is to say, the big news wasn’t that there’s a new division, but instead will be what books are they releasing?
Granted, there is the report that Kodansha USA was captalized with 2 Million Dollars, but that was coupled with the following: “Printing, market research and distribution will be outsourced to local companies while sales and marketing strategy will be handled by Kodansha.” Now, $2MM isn’t nothing, but the rest of that statement leaves me scratching my head as to what’s different: Someone else (a player to be named later, but I’m thinking some arm of Random House) will be printing and distributing the books.
& There is a lot of business double-speak in that statement; marketing is everything and nothing. Yes, without proper sales support a title does nothing, but all this talk of Marketing and Strategy leaves me cold. Kodansha USA will directly direct the ‘soft sciences’ of sales and marketing — but tell me, does translation and localization fall under the aegis of Marketing or of printing & distribution?
Who exactly is producing the new books? Translation of manga isn’t something you can run through Google, it is all art and no science. Sure, you want to sell me a book, but it had better be a Good Book or we’re all wasting our time. You know, the more I look into this Kodansha debacle the more I feel that it may end up as a big mistake; to date, there is nothing reported about the procedure of bringing Kodansha manga direct to the American audience, just some Pie in the Sky spitballing about New Company This and Two Million That.
(Madoff is the clearest recent example that one can easily ‘sell’ nothing. What, exactly, are you trying to sell us, Kodansha?)
Where are the damn books? Where is an announcement of any forthcoming books? Throw me a bone; I love quite a number of Kodansha titles and hell, I want this to work, but the deafening silence points to K-USA being much more of a 2010 thing than anything that we’ll see this year — and even a 2010 release is a mere figment of my imagination, my best guess, as nothing has been announced.
And given the highly improbable Sep. ’08 dates that were first reported — which I questioned not once but twice — I enjoy the vindication of my initial pessimism but still, I’d rather be reading the comics.
I guess what I want to know, after all this time, is just what Kodansha USA is going to do to my beloved US manga market? Have there been any additional reports past internet rumor?
-- not that anyone is paying me to place ads, but in lieu of paid advertising, here are some recommended links.--
support our friends
note: this comic is not about beer
note: this comic is not about Elvis
if I win the lottery, Bradley Schenck will be getting a pile of cash to redesign this site from scratch.
In my head, I sound like Yahtzee (quite a feat, given my inherited U.S.-flat-midwestern-accent.)
where I start my browsing day...
...and one source I trust for reviews, reports, and opinion on manga specifically...
...and where my casual browsing usually ends, past the research for various articles that I have to do each day.
Note: NSFW. Icarus, best described as "the Thinking Man's Porn Manga." Simon does me the undeserved favor of dropping free review copies my way, which I have callously ignored to date. Simon's blog is also a must-read, for a look at the manga industry from a small indy publisher's perspective. Plus, porn.
Top banner photo credits, from right to left:
- Soviet concept art vintage 1967, ganked from Dark Roasted Blend
- Excerpt of a souvenir card from the 1929 round-the-world flight of the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, ganked from Oldbeacon.com (via Metafilter)
- Goodyear Rocket Airship concept, posted in a 1958 Popular Mechanics article; ganked from online archives of the rec.aviation.military usenet group, found via GIS.
- Photo of the sculpture "Guard" by Hans van Bentem, located in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; ganked from Wikimedia Commons
- Soviet concept art from 1970, also ganked from Dark Roasted Blend
- Butt end of a R-7 Soyuz-class rocket booster of recent vintage, ganked from Michael Saxe at TravelBlog.
- Overlayed schematics, colour-inverted, of the Lippisch P-09 Rocket Plane, the Sänger-Bred Rocket Bomber, an unnamed heavy-tank-class mecha, and a second unnamed mecha in fighter-jet configuration (both anonymous to keep my ass from infringement -- and at that resolution & in combination I claim fair use as part of an artistic and satirical collage)
- Excerpt of "Dr. J.W. Mauchly makes an adjustment to ENIAC, the massive computer he designed to assist the U.S. military during World War II," ganked from Science Clarified
-- Logo art is original, credit M. Blind; logo created and photos composited in the Gimp 2.2
