In response to the huge snafu wherein it mistakenly underpriced hundreds of graphic novels (charging $14.99 or less for books often priced at over $100) thereby leading to a bestseller list suddenly populated by dozens of comics and graphic novels, Amazon.com has done what it does when it screws up and people want to know what’s up: It has completely clammed up and refused to comment.

So says a Publishers Weekly report by Calvin Reid updating what Amazon has only referred to so far as a “technical glitch.” (See yesterday’s MobyLives report.) Reid says it looks like the “glitch” has been fixed, and “Amazon.com’s Top 100 Book List has returned to reality,” but Amazon apparently doesn’t want to pay the distributor for those books that it sold at the wrong price:

…. a source at Diamond Comics Distributors, the dominant distributor in the comics shop market and Amazon’s supplier, said Amazon and Diamond were in discussions over resolution of the situation. No doubt, they are also discussing who will take the economic hit if they honor some of these orders, a hit that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Of course, Amazon reported over $9.4 billion in sales in its last quarterly report — yes, that’s billion with a “b,” and that was in one quarter alone — and it was their mistake, so one has to wonder why Diamond has to negotiate anything with them. But then one remembers Diamond wants to keep selling with Amazon, Amazon can be pretty thuggish, and, well, you can imagine where this is going to go for Diamond.

Meanwhile, a report on Bleeding Cool says some purchasers have gotten letters canceling their purchases, while others who bought multiple copies of books have been told they’re getting only one.

In response to the news (see the MobyLives report) that Amazon is seeking approval of the Canadian government to expand its operation in Canada, Quill and Quire informs us that the Canadian Booksellers Association has released a statement “demanding that the government reject the online retailer’s application.”  Says the statement:

CBA contends that allowing Amazon to operate a business within Canada would contravene the Investment Canada Act which requires that foreign investments in the book publishing and distribution sector be compatible with national cultural policies and be of net benefit to Canada and the Canadian-controlled sector.

CBA President Stephen Cribar argues that Amazon’s entry into Canada would detrimentally affect the country’s independent businesses and cultural industries: “Individual Canadian booksellers have traditionally played a key role in ensuring the promotion of Canadian authors and Canadian culture. These are values that no American dot.com retailer could ever purport to understand or promote.”

CBA urges the Canadian government and the Department of Canadian Heritage to continue its support of our unique cultural perspective by placing reasonable limits on American domination of our book market and rejecting Amazon.com’s current application.

Thanks to Craig Teicher over at E-book Newser for starting this conversation.  I admit it, I’m obsessed with price.  And now Imperial, William Vollmann’s door-stopper of a book, is available on Kindle for the low, low Kindle price of…$31.95?  Reaction to the price has been, well, angry and confused.  Can publishers get away with charging that much for a book?  Since we can’t really look at the numbers (Amazon does well to keep them hidden), we can’t really say for sure whether or not people are buying the e-book, and whether or not those people are buying despite the price (or how many Vollmann fans have Kindles, or really want to read 1300 pages on a tiny screen–the questions go on and on).

In the discussion though, one question has been asked over and over again: how can publishers get away with charging so much for an e-book when so much of the physical production cost has been eliminated.  I answer this question with another question.  Does it matter?

Or rather, why can’t a publisher use the much bigger profit margins of a higher-price e-book to offset costs in the remainder of their business?  Using excessive profits from one project to fund another isn’t an anomaly, not even in our own industry.  We do it already, in many different ways.  The mass-market and commercial bestsellers make it possible for houses to discover new talents and publish more avant-garde and niche works.

But regardless, its all just business.  Its how we (as a company, as an industry) survive–and how other industries survive as well.  I often think that things I purchase are over-priced (like these jeans I’m currently wearing…) but that doesn’t mean I don’t buy them.  I know that they are made outside the US for an extremely low price and that the profit margins are huge, both for the retailer and the wholesaler.  My brand name cup of coffee?  Same thing.  But I don’t think said brand name is “ripping me off” (or if I do, it hasn’t stopped me yet).  After all, I think these jeans make me look great and they’re extremely comfortable.  That cup of coffee really gets me going in the morning.  So while I might not want to spend $31.95 on a Vollmann novel, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to (although that could go towards 6 cups of coffee or 1/6 of a pair of jeans).  As much as we love our customers (and we do! We love you!), we have to think of our business as well.

So we’ll see if this price point is sustainable.  If it is, great.  If not, we adjust.  Welcome to the world of $200 denim and $5 lattes (and $260 Kindles and $500 iPads)…

Kevin Sampsell at Powell's

Kevin Sampsell has become something of a legend in US publishing circles. By day he’s a bookseller at one of our leading indies — Powell’s, in Portland, Oregon, but in his spare time he’s an avant-garde writer and one of he country’s most cutting edge micro-publishers. His Future Tense books started with stapled-together poetry chapbooks and still does tiny print runs of 200-500 books, but it has busted out numerous writers who’ve gone on to greater fame.

Now, he’s published a book of his own — the memoir A Common Pornography, and the Portland Oregonian has an in-depth profile by books editor Jeff Baker talking about what led up to the book:

In August of 2008, a few months after his father died, Sampsell had a panic attack in the middle of the night. He ran naked from his Portland apartment and drove around town before winding up at a friend’s house, where he sat in the bathtub, crying and screaming. He was working on two books at the time, “A Common Pornography” and “Portland Noir,” an anthology of mystery and crime fiction. The memoir started as a series of memory experiments, short bursts of prose about his childhood that he hoped to turn into a short story. He found the exercise helpful in the way many writers use prompts to unlock their creativity, and published an early version of “A Common Pornography” in 2002.

The UK webmag 3AM also published early extracts from the book; word continued to get around and the project eventually landed at Harper Perennial. Signs so far are it’s a success — Sampsell has been touring for it for over a month (more details on his blog).

And Sampsell’s book has led to an even happier ending than you might think, judging by the anecdote above. As the Oregonian report notes,

Kevin Sampsell wrote the story of his life and is making sure it has a happy ending.

Books with the hero on bended knee, asking his true love to marry him in front of a cheering audience, aren’t the kind Sampsell writes or publishes, but there he was in Powell’s City of Books earlier this month, looking up at his girlfriend, Frayn Masters, with tears in his eyes.

He’d just finished a reading and slide show from his new memoir “A Common Pornography” in a room where he’d worked hundreds of author events as a Powell’s employee, and now he put an exclamation point on the evening with a surprise marriage proposal.

She said yes, by the way.

Tired of hearing about all the math of Tim Burton’s movie Alice in Wonderland? The budget, the gross, the box office?

Well, in an op-ed in the New York Times, Melanie Bayley, a doctoral candidate in English literature at Oxford University, takes an interesting look at the math that was on Charles Dodgson’s (aka Lewis Carroll’s) mind when he was writing Alice: “Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.”

Bayley goes on the posit that each of Alice’s adventures addressed a development in new math: “Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In Alice, he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.”

For instance, Bayley says,”Alice’s exchange with the Caterpillar parodies the first purely symbolic system of algebra, proposed in the mid-19th century by Augustus De Morgan, a London math professor. De Morgan had proposed a more modern approach to algebra, which held that any procedure was valid as long as it followed an internal logic. This allowed for results like the square root of a negative number, which even De Morgan himself called ‘unintelligible’ and ‘absurd’ (because all numbers when squared give positive results)….Such loose mathematical reasoning would have riled a punctilious logician like Dodgson. And so, the Caterpillar is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah.”

If Bayley is correct, it seems that Dodgeson was working out some of his animus toward the new math of his day and it’s proponents. Turning the basics of his world topsy-turvy certainly created brilliantly the sense of unease in his always-disconcerting children’s story — special effects not required.

A Publishers Weekly story by Calvin Reid reports a “computer glitch” late last week caused Amazon.com to sell “hundreds if not thousands” of very high-end comics and graphic novels at unbelievably low discounts. The result: Amazon.com’s Top 100 bestseller list was suddenly filled with graphic books.

The news broke on the comics news blog Bleeding Cool. The PW report tells what happened next:

news of unbelievable bargains spread quickly on Twitter, and readers flocked to Amazon to place orders for graphic novels at wild discounts. Prices included high end boxed set hardcover collections, really priced at more than $100 but suddenly offered for $14.99 or less.

A source at Diamond Comic Distributors, which supplied the comics to Amazon, said the mispricing was a data error and that it was being fixed. It is unclear how many items were ordered during the period of mispricing although there is speculation that there were thousands of orders.

However, the PW story cites one disturbing possibility: That it “is also unclear how many—if any—of the orders Amazon will honor.”

Apparently, last Thursday was “Black Thursday” for employees at Borders stores around the country. As a Publishers Weekly report by Jim Milliot details, “expected cuts in the store workforce at Borders began last week in what employees on various blogs are calling ‘Black Thursday.’ The number of cuts its unclear, and the retailer had only a vague response when asked for clarification of how many jobs were eliminated. ‘Borders is always looking for opportunities to improve performance and profitability. Any recent changes are a continuation of our efforts,’ a Borders statement read.”

A report on Publishers Lunch yesterday (subscription only) reported “Many individual posts have been made by people who held training supervisor and inventory supervisor positions who say they were let go.” Publishers Lunch also cited a quote “said to be taken from an internal announcement”:

We made the decision to eliminate the training supervisor position so that we could allocate more hours to the sales floor. Training remains an important function in our stores, and the responsibilities of the training supervisor will be redistributed among the leadership positions. Additional supervisor- and manager-level positions were eliminated in some stores to align with the appropriate structure based on sales volume, and a few BSR stores made changes to align their leadership structure with their volume levels as well.

As a previous MobyLives story reported, Borders laid off 10% of its corporate workforce barely a month ago.

Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies, talks with Bloomberg’s Betty Liu about the role of film libraries in the financial health of movie studios and the outlook for independent filmmakers.

Author Steve Stern

Steve Stern, author of the Melville House novella North of God –which Sadford Pinsker praised as “a Jewish-American classic” — is back again, but this time he’s taking a page out of Charles Dickens’playbook, serializing his forthcoming novel The Frozen Rabbi in postings on Tablet Magazine, a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture. The book comes out in May from Algonquin, but not before the eager masses get a sneak preview of it at Tablet.

So, not to give anything away, but … there’s this rabbi who gets frozen, see, through the ages, see, and at one point he thaws out in 1960’s suburban America …. In other words it’s pure Stern — funny, bizarre (really bizarre) and brilliant! And did we mention funny?

Matt Taibbi

When Vanity Fair contributor James Verini approached Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi about his work on the shuttered Russian newspaper The Exile, Taibbi suggested that Verini consider killing the story. As he wrote in an email: “In the end nobody really wants to read about a couple of overgrown suburban teenagers writing about anal sex and the clap and then calling themselves revolutionaries when some third-world dictator gets bored of letting them stay published.”

But Verini persevered and Taibbi agreed to a lunch, though he again tried to talk the reporter out of the story, stressing that the story of the newspaper was best told in his 2000 book, co-authored with Mark Ames, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.

I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good.

“The book wasn’t good?” he said.

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said.

“My book?” he said.

“Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said.

At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.