TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘The Solomon Scandals’ Category

By David Rothman

"The Apple rumor du jour is that Sony Music Entertainment will license DRM-free tracks to iTunes, under the iTunes Plus program," reports Billboard.biz.

Time for Sony’s e-book side to experiment with DRMless ePub, which its new reader devices can display? Maybe with social DRM? I think so! Without traditional DRM to gum things up, ePub is a standard for real. Sony and independent stores—the company laudably plans to reach out to indies, when its forthcoming readers go wireless—could exploit this to the max in marketing. "Buy from us and own your e-books for real."

My personal stake is this matter—as a writer

I know: Sony will need cooperation from publishers. But at least the DRMless approach should be available as an option for cooperating houses. I’d love to see The Solomon Scandals offered through Sony without "protection"; I’m not just talking theory here. My publisher, too, dislikes DRM’s hassles for consumers. To one extent or another, the technology is a threat to our livelihoods, and I really dislike Amazon’s DRM requirements. A DRMless option would be one way for Sony and friends to distinguish themselves from Amazon and woo consumers and forward-looking publishers.

A reminder: The TeleBlog has both pro- and anti-DRM readers, and I encourage both sides to speak up here, in a civil way.

Related: Wikipedia item on Sony Music Entertainment.

Image credit for "Social Way" photo: Casey West.

By David Rothman

Quantity, not quality, counts more for National Novel Writing Month. Just crank out The Book and worry later about polishing it. “The kamikaze approach,” NaNoWriMo says, “forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.”

But is this right for every author? Or every book? Some novels need to be felt from the start. And that demands time, particularly for fiction requiring extensive research, too.

Thanks for the decades

I speak with prejudice aplenty. I’ve worked on The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel, for some 30 years in between other projects. Warner almost bought it around 1980. Luckily Sales overruled a high-ranking editor who wanted to publish Scandals, then known as The Cover-Up. That gave me a few stray decades to try to get Scandals right. And even then I’ve been making changes up to the last minute (Twilight Times Books is aiming for December publication in trade paperback and E, including ePub).

A Modest Proposal: National Novel Writing Decade

Maybe instead of National Novel Writing Month, we need National Novel Writing Decade.

The memorable cover image, as it currently exists: What do you think? Especially of the building Solomon is holding? Here’s a link to a PDF so you can see the cover in detail, including the back. The above image shows both the front cover and the spine (to the left).

Related: Another take on National Novel Writing Month, by Paul Biba. I see room for different approaches. It’s okay to take less than three decades to write your opus.

By Paul Biba

Here’s an update on David.  I spoke with him for about 1/2 hour today and he asked me to do a post thanking everyone, from the bottom of his heart, for all the expressions of sympathy that were posted on the blog.  He asked me to send his regrets that he is unable to reply to each one individually.

David sounded pretty good and he says that he is recuperating from his pneumonia and is now walking 3/4 miles per day in short increments. He is now back home, which is a great boost to his spirits.  David says that his main priorities right now are recovering and getting his book, The Solomon Scandals,  ready for publication.  If things go well he hopes it will hit the stores sometime in December. David tells me that he would dearly love to see the blog evolve into more than a “David Rothman operation” and would love it to become a multi-contributor work with lots of interactivity between readers and participants.

By David Rothman

This week Twilight Times Books is locking up the first galleys for The Solomon Scandals, the D.C. newspaper novel on which I’ve worked, on and off, for three decades. It’ll be out in P, not just E, complete with an almost surely memorable cover from Carl W. Scarlborough, who normally designs for Godine, known for its aesthetics.

Matt Richtel’s approach is just the opposite. The New York Timesman and comic writer has drawn 400 subscribers to his Twitter posts of a novel done in real time. Details:

Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.

In my case, I’ve for the last two months been using Twitter to write a real-time thriller. Hence: Twiller. (Cheap word play is what you get when you disintermediate, as they say, your agent and editor).

It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cell phone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon.

So here’s the big issue. Will humanity and literature be better off with traditional novels or with Twillers and other novels done on Twitter? I say a mix of the two is fine, just so we don’t overdo the Twitter fiction. Who knows? Twillers might even lead readers to the authors’ traditional works. Promo tool? Notice the Borders photo in the Richtel image? That said, just how reflective can Twillers and the rest be? Are we impoverishing ourselves by Twittering novels? Or just making literature more vibrant and broadening its audiences?

Related: Hooked: A Thriller about Love and Other Addictions, Richtel’s more traditional novel. Also see Valleywag post (source of image), which Richtel says is off target.

By David Rothman

Was this guitar-lovin’ environmental lawyer—yes, I’ll explain why the guitar matters here—aiming for an April Fool’s joke in August?

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Dusty Horwitt complains that Internet-related technology is too cheap and overloads us with junky Web sites and other threats to humanity.

A senior public lands analyst with the Environmental Working Group, Horwitt isn’t calling for a blog tax directly, and, in fact, he wants an energy tax to crimp many activities, not just the Internet.

But you can tell where his heart is, assuming he isn’t in a Swiftian mode or a bait-the-animals mood, which, alas, I don’t think he is.

A funny lapse from the chattering class

I’m not picking on Horwitt alone. His elitism is the kind about which most politicians and lawyers in D.C. just tend to be more circumspect in public. Same for certain journalists. A graduate of Brown University and the Georgetown Law University Center, Horwitt has worked as a reporter and, as a member of the chattering class, should know better. However funny the lapse is, I’m disappointed that a world-class paper like the Post let it slip through. The Horwitt commentary appeared in the same edition as a stellar column from Deborah Howell, the ombudsman—headlined Why Isn’t the Post Easier to Reach? And now here’s Horwitt hoping to make America less wired than it would be otherwise? Who are his real heroes? The Slowsky turtles in the Comcast commercial?

Ironically Dusty’s father, Sanford, wrote a well-received biography of Saul Alinsky, a community organizer who would have loved the Internet as a way to bypass Big Media, even if the main action remained in the streets. Among Alinsky’s 11 Rules for Radicals were "Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon" and "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." Imagine what a free spirit like Alinsky would have made of Dusty Horwitt’s piece in the Outlook section.

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By David Rothman

Some three decades after I began it on a Nixon-era Selectric, The Solomon Scandals is finally going to a copy editor, under a deadline. Drop-dead time: 1 p.m. That’s my project of the morning. Expect posts by late afternoon or early evening. Meanwhile it’ll be great if other TeleBlog regulars have time for their own.

By David Rothman

Two engineering mavens from Clarkson and Penn State have been at work dissecting The Solomon Scandals.

They’re helping me bring down an IRS/CIA building put up by a clippy contractor.

I feel a little like bin-Laden or one of his henchmen plotting scenarios. The destruction has to work. I’m endlessly grateful to the professors for their uncovering the mistakes that a nonexpert would make when writing on a subject so complex.

Right now it looks as if we’re headed toward a mix of missing rebars, inferior materials, use of a reinforced concrete raft rather than piles driven down to the rock, a gas explosion and some oil nearby to heat up steel and weaken it. Oh, and there’ll have been lots and lots of rain in the past week—which, in ways I’ll explain in the book would weaken the building further.

The e-book angle

So is there an e-book angle here? You bet. While our interactivity is happening via e-mail, perhaps in the future it can be more elaborate and more public—with a forum where engineering students can comment on the case history we’re creating in effect. That’s what I’m hoping. Someday, in fact, the forum might even be built into the e-book of Scandals—perhaps even a special edition for engineering students.

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By David Rothman

For some days now, I’d been testing the Stanza e-reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

With Kindle-level ease, I could download classics and public domain titles from Feedbooks—everything from Tarzan of the Apes to Edith Wharton’s Summer.

But Stanza lacked a way to bring in files already on my desktop PC.

That’s changed (download here). To the left, you can see how The Solomon Scandals showed up on my iPod Touch.

Word 2002 in style: Just one of many formats supported

Scandals isn’t a finished book, just a Word 2002 file in editing in an RTF incarnation at Twilight Times Books.

But you’ll notice how slick it looked on my Touch when I tested Word 2002.

Stanza was smart enough to detect my chapters, marked only by forced page breaks and centered boldface. Look at the style it assigned the centered boldface I’d originally entered without a font change. As for the unneeded title at the top of the page, I suspect that I could just avoid entering a title within Word’s "Properties" menu. If not, perhaps Lexcycle can make the necessary tweak.

No, Stanza wasn’t perfect—it failed to pick up the italics in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example. But notice the hyphenation?

I didn’t even have to hook up my HP desktop computer to the Touch. Stanza, like BookShelf, let me transfer books wirelessly.

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By David Rothman

A young Brooklyn novelist named Tao Lin offered 60 percent of his royalties from his next book to members of the public. Would you believe, investors snapped up six shares. Each share, hawked for $2K, will bring in ten percent of royalties.

Yes, as you can see at left, Tao has a track record as a fiction writer. And, yes, the existing global publishing industry so often bungles in gauging the financial prospects of books. I wish Tao all kinds of luck. He is quoted as saying that "I actually will work better on my second novel, the way the novel is right now, if I have no obligations or responsibilities at all.” So why not get the money up front?

The nobody-one-knows-nothing factor

But do we really want this new option to become a common practice? Might the public end up buying Brooklyn Bridges, so to speak? Didn’t William Goldman, the Hollywood screenwriter, once say, "Nobody knows nothing"? And he was talking about pros.

Of course, the argument could be made that the $2K shares will be feel-good patronage of the arts. But potentially some real legal issues might still arise with the SEC and other agencies. And beyond that, isn’t the "literary" world fixated enough on money? Some houses won’t even buy books unless they see best-seller potential.

This is a little close to home, with The Solomon Scandals, my D.C. newspaper novel, due out in the fall from Twilight Times Books in P and E. Writing a good book is time-consuming enough. Do I really want to worry about government forms such as disclosure statements? I’d rather write about imagined scandals than risk being part of a real one.

The real problem—and opportunity—for writers and publishers

Meanwhile, as amusing as the Tao’s gimmick is, lets consider the real financial problem of writers and publishers—or maybe the opportunity. While the U.S. GDP is maybe $13 trillion, Americans are probably spending less than $100B a year on books. I’d like to see that increase, given the value that the best books deliver in enlightenment and entertainment. A TeleRead-style library system could help by creating demand, not just through library purchases but also by building interest in books for sale by the private sector. The grubby stuff isn’t as much fun as Las Vegas-style schemes, but for readers and writers alike, the end results of a TeleRead-style approach will be endlessly more satisfying.

Related:  The Telegraph, a New York Times blog, and the Mumbai Mirror.

(Thanks to Tamas Simon and Mike Cane.)

By David Rothman

Correction: The online version of the New Yorkk Times was not as clear as it could have been, thanks to rather confusing layout.  Prof. Boskin correctly says the dog quote actually came from then-Sen. Nancy Kassebaum—with whom I’ll check. - D.R., Oct. 23, 2008 (headline changed).

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd still hasn’t explained how she picked up an iffy quote on March 10, 1989: “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” I queried her twice via a Times e-mail form and find her silence rather disappointing. Ah! But there’s a happy twist suggesting that, as I’d hoped, she published the quote in good faith.

Thanks to Garson O’Toole, the nom de plume of a TeleBlog regular, we now know that the quote appeared in the Times at least as early as June 7, 1987. In dispensing advice for Alan Greenspan, then about to chair the Federal Reserve, a Stanford economist used the above quote word for word. I’m going to write Prof. Michael J. Boskin and see where he got the quote. Yet another mention in the Times appeared on October 15, 1987, in a letter from Timothy Norbeck, executive director of the Connecticut State Medical Society, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Quote still iffy—but you never know

The quote and a predecessor are still problematic—the Harry S. Truman library couldn’t find anything before playwright Samuel Gallu used, “You want a friend in life, get a DOG!” in 1975 play. Dramatic license? But who knows? Maybe we can surprise the Truman Library and find that the quote is authentic. If not, might the Times want to do a retraction? At least as recently as last year, the line was still popping up there. Both the library and Ralph Keyes, author of The Quote Verifier, mentioned Ms. Dowd’s 1989 use of the quote, also cited by Bill Clinton.

Related: Earlier TeleBlog items on the quote, which I wanted to confirm for use in a forthcoming  newspaper novel.

By David Rothman

Okay, so Jossip isn’t the Columbia Journalism Review.

And the headline is a tad overdone: New York Times rocked by Maureen Dowd’s Harry Truman quote scandal—even if there’s a qualifier in a smaller font, "According to a loose definition of the word ‘rocked.’"

Still, it’s good to see more people wondering if Harry Truman actually said, "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog," a quote that appeared first in Ms. Dowd’s work for the Times. The TeleBlog is simply the most recent outfit to revive the issue, having been preceded over the years by USA Today and presumably others. The Truman Library can’t find such a quote, just a similar one in a play whose author probably used dramatic license: "You want a friend in life, get a dog!"

The real news: Times public editor ignoring issue—while the NYT still uses the quote

Here’s the real news, the fresh twist in the controversy. The office of Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt shrugged off the matter when I queried him. Michael McElroy e-mailed me that it was outside Hoyt’s jurisdiction because "its use was before Mr. Hoyt’s tenure and therefore outside of our purview."

Wrong. As I showed earlier this morning, Times writers are still using Ms. Dowd’s memorable Truman quote on occasion, even if just paraphrased (here, for example).

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By David Rothman

I’ve asked this before.

Did Harry S. Truman really say, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog?"

Or "buy a dog"—the words that Maureen Dowd of the New York Times first attributed to him on March 10, 1989?

After a month, I have yet to receive a reply from Ms. Dowd, whom I tried to contact though a Times form on the Web. Does anyone have the Pulitzer Prize winner’s e-mail address handy for my private use? Got access to a New York Times corporate directory? Even if she were easy to reach on the phone, I’d prefer the e-mail approach so I could share her precise response here.

Meanwhile, along the way, my experience raises a not-so-trivial question. Is there a statute of limitations on possibly inaccurate quotes that appear on the Web through old archives? The office of the Times’ public editor said the 1989 quote was outside his jurisdiction because it appeared before he started on the job. But read on! Times writers are still relying on Ms. Dowd’s work.

Why this cosmic question

Why is the Dowd-spread quote—she referred to it again in 2000—almost surely apocryphal?

Even the Harry S. Truman Library can’t find an earlier appearance of the quote, just a similar line in an old play, whose author, Samuel Gallu, obviously might have used dramatic license: "You want a friend in life, get a dog!"

No grudge against Ms. Dowd. The substitution of "in Washington" for "in life" is pure genius, in my opinion—however it happened. In fact, I’m reminded of the accidental invention of penicillin. Sir Alexander Fleming unwittingly discovered that mold killed bacteria, which, like sleazy Washington lobbyists and other D.C. cutthroats, may be lethal if allowed to multiply beyond control. More importantly, I like Ms. Dowd’s columns. I just want the full story here. I’m watching out for the credibility of Thackeray, the talking Afghan Hound in the epilogue of The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel, who uses the quote in a late-21st century fund-raiser on behalf of "pre-virtual literacy."

Blown off despite serious query reflecting past research

With Thack in mind, I futilely asked the Clark Hoyt, the Times’ Public Editor, to give me Ms. Dowd’s e-mail address so I could write the columnist directly to be certain that my earlier query had reached her. The PE’s office normally won’t provide contact information, but I’d done my research via correspondence with a friendly archivist at the Truman library. Hadn’t I earned an exception? Couldn’t annoyances like this be one reason why people distrust the old media, especially in the Internet era when the past is just a click away?

Mind you, I love the New York Times, flaws and all; let me praise the Times for so generously sharing its archives, an act of good journalism, not just a sign of business acumen. In matters cyber, the Times is miles ahead of the pack. Now I hope Ms. Dowd will meet my expectations and share with us the true origins of the dog quote. If it’s wrong and if Ms. Dowd won’t do a follow-up, will the Times issue a correction?

Statute of limitations at the Times on inaccurate quotes published on the Web?

Is there a statute of limitations on possibly inaccurate quotes, including those accessible via the Web?

Michael McElroy in Clark Hoyt’s office has e-mailed me: "As for the Truman quote, its use was before Mr. Hoyt’s tenure and therefore outside of our purview." Hoyt’s term began on May 14, 2007. As recently as January 27, 2007, the Times had published Harry Hurt’s article with the Truman-related dog quote—oft-repeated over the years in one form or another in the Times and elsewhere. Should just a few months have mattered? 

Besides, on or about September 27, 2007, Sam Roberts’ draft podcast script paraphrased the quote:"In Washington, Truman once said, if you want a friend, get a dog."

Directly or indirectly, Ms. Dowd was almost surely Roberts’ source. Would Roberts have done the paraphrase if he’d been in touch earlier with the Truman library? For all I know, there may be other recent usages of the quote or variations. And what about the future? Just how much hair-splitting does Clark Hoyt’s office need?

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