5 Things I Learned Upon Being Freshly Pressed

This blog recently got “Freshly Pressed” by our host, WordPress. That means an editor stumbled in and decided to feature a particular post of mine, underlining its existence to the whole WordPress “community,” which is god knows how many bloggers. The net effect over three days or so was a ton of new readers of my “Adventures in Editing” series, many of whom sampled other posts as well, to my immense satisfaction. (Though still not as many in aggregate as showed up one single day in 2011 when I posted the first “Editing” installment, and it got noticed, then tweeted, then re-tweeted, etc. The viral deal is still the most effective method of rapid transmission. In olden days, we used to call this word of mouth.) Nevertheless, Fresh Pressing brought in lots of new eyeballs, so thank you, WordPress. For my take on my Pressing experience, look directly to the right. One may display the “widget” at the top of the column only upon WP’s award. It ain’t exactly a medical degree for the office wall, but still, I’m not complaining, I’m bragging.

I have been floating in a tiny WordPress backwater since I started this journal in 2009: in general, only people who already know me have tended to tune in, which is OK with me too. I’m fine with anyone who wants to “follow,” but the many curious newbies I’ve managed to Freshly Impress in the past few days may be only interested in one or two topics, and I’m not sure I can satisfy them every time. I’m really glad they’re here, but I’d rather roam instead. So let’s see how many hang on for the long haul.

Now the stallions have turned back into mice and my daily page views are gradually reverting to the mean. But being a WordPress soopahstah for a few days has shown me a few things that I never would have guessed otherwise, and when you, the WordPress blogger, accept a Fresh Pressing, you should remember them:

1. There are lots of spam “followers,” despite WordPress’s generally great spam filter, and some aren’t so easy to spot. Once you get Freshly Pressed, the gates open. You get “comments” written in perfect English, but they’re robocall-ish, and a peek at the sender reveals all. You get people who are following you only because they hope you’ll click back: for example, I just now got a notice that I’m being followed by a blogger called “qualitydiabeticsocks.” I have sent the obvious dross to spamland, so good riddance, and I don’t mind if “qualitydiabeticsocks” gets an email every time I post – but I didn’t know such begging even existed until I got Pressed. (There have always been obvious spammers who aren’t fluent in English, like those sad-making, emailing “Nigerian princes” who want to “give you money,” but this is another level of sophistication.) Fortunately, nobody can post on this site without first being approved by me. But get Pressed and you’ll soon encounter an entirely different class of spammer.
2. There’s a 14-year-old kid out there who thinks he’s Lenny Bruce. (I take him at his word on the age.) He likes to riff on the titles of Freshly Pressed posts, which often give him great ammunition when taken out of context. If you get Pressed, you’re probably gonna get mocked too. Sometimes his stuff is indeed funny, but not as often as he imagines it is. Keep plugging, kid, say I, and one day you too might be in the SNL writers’ room wishing you were anywhere else on the goddam planet.
3. WordPress bloggers are more likely to talk back than is the general public. I love that. I’ve always wanted the dialogue (that’s what the name of my blog means, after all), and these are mostly people who are sending out their own blog posts for the same reason, to get some two-way going. I hip my Facebook friends to each new post, and lately most of the back-and-forth has unfortunately been over there, where it’s ephemeral, rather than here, where it sticks around. The bloggers who have gravitated my way in the past few days tend to feel the same way, and are much more willing to endure the moderation process, which may be annoying but is also quick and permanent — you only need my thumbs up for your first post; after that, your comments go straight onto the site. (Unless you suddenly decide to start selling quality diabetic socks, that is.) I’m every bit as gratified when you talk back as when you read in the first place, and bloggers tend to be chatters, so thanks, WordPress, for bringin ‘em on.
4. There are many, many writers on WP. We’re all crawling, scratching, etching our thoughts into some verbal sculpture that others might recognize as notable. Dudes and dudettes, I know the feeling. You don’t need payment. You just need the rush. Many of you are super-inventive, and I have been constantly amazed at how many permutations there actually are. I was once an editor, which is what “Adventures in Editing” is all about, which is probably what helped Press me in the first place. But I’ve been inundated in the last few days by what I judge to be talented writers (yep, even the sophomoric Lenny Bruce kid!), who are dying to find a proper forum. Your biggest hurdle will be to forget about writing like somebody else and start carving out your own niche. They always say write about what you know. That’s still damn good advice: to seek reality (even if you’re writing about ETs or dragons) by working outward from what you can see and smell and taste and feel every day. I’ll call to the witness stand, oh, Scott Nicholson. Read this guy. He plugs and plugs. He’s innately good – as are quite an impressive few of you! – but his best stuff doesn’t issue from what he learned reading King and Matheson and Poe and Lovecraft and all the rest. It comes from what he experiences on a typical North Carolina day. And you have just as much raw material as Scott does, if you’ll only use it. Thus endeth today’s sermon. By the way: if you don’t read, don’t write.
5. You need a “round number” like 5 or 10 or 25 to constitute one of these come-hither blog headlines, so here’s the last one. Sorry if you think I’m imploding at the end and cheating you out of something, but hey, that’s postmodernism. Meanwhile, I loved being a WordPress princess for a few days, and I invite you all to stick around, keep posting, talk back whenever you like, and above all, take care of each other.

Koox ‘n’ Flix

The fact that a poorly-made and hateful video can foment rioting halfway around the world is the dark side of instant communication. The same technology which helped create the Arab Spring can be used to upend it.

You can form your own opinion about what the varying statements by Mitt Romney have to say about his candidacy for President. I’ve certainly formed mine. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Unlike Governor Romney, I can speak with authority on this creative matter because I’ve actually seen the 14-minute “trailer” for a “film” called THE INNOCENCE OF MUSLIMS – from all we can tell, it’s the only part that actually exists. If you’re also curious, find it for yourself: it’s easy, but I’m not going to help you by linking to it.

The backstory is as shady as it can be: the video was made by pseudonymous people who have lied about everything, including their “$5 million budget.” (“Sam Bacile,” the “director,” falsely told everyone he was an Israeli Jew, just to stir the pot a little bit more.) They even duped their actors, who answered an ad in Backstage like most other struggling thespians and dutifully reported for work. The marketing department seems to consist of Terry Jones, the off-world theocrat who infamously threatened to burn the Koran a few years back and has been missing those ENG crews ever since. (Monty Python’s namesake member must cringe every time he hears about this blasphemous fool.)

OK, so let’s go to the video tape. It’s disjointed, impossible to follow in any traditional story sense, and it jumps around like a newborn wallaby. Thus, I’d imagine, its titular depiction as a “trailer”: we’re only giving you the best stuff out of context, just like the big guys do. But listen: most of the lighting is just what you’d expect from a competent film-school production. Most everything’s in perfect focus. You can even tell that some of the actors are obviously pros. “Tech creds,” as Variety might put it, are not dissimilar to those in a no-budget indie. It can absolutely masquerade as a real production to deep unsophisticates.

But any five-year-old can suss out the incompetent desperation. It’s clear that the actors on set were not required to speak the name of Islam’s prophet; it’s clumsily looped in (that is, re-recorded after the fact), like all those risible attempts to cleanse R-rated dialogue for network tv. I’m just spitballing here, but if the Backstage casting call actually asked for Muslim actors, then they would have been horrified to take part in a physical depiction of the prophet – a canonical no-no. Even the “innocence” title may have been invented to lure them in. I have no proof; I’m just speculating. (We later learned that at least some of the actors were told they were working on a film called DESERT WARRIORS.) One actress has come forward to say she had performed under false pretenses, and deeply regrets doing so. Other whole scenes are clearly looped, no doubt to conceal their real purpose on set; sometimes it’s like watching a Sergio Leone movie, with actors of multiple nationalities.

The CG work is hilarious. In “outside” scenes, the actors appear to be walking on air above the desert sands, like an 80s-era Chyron effect achieved by a high-school member of the AV Club. All that’s missing are the shimmer lines. As far as the red meat is concerned, we revert to elementary school. The prophet is accused of everything shivering haters can possibly think of, including being gay – and they use that precise word, “gay,” even though the “story” is “set” 1500 years ago. Man, I can distinctly remember using that word innocently in my own lifetime, wholly apart from its current context, and I’m not even 1000! He hacks through men, women and beasts. He molests children. His henchmen snicker like Snidely Whiplash as they fake drawing and quartering a senior citizen.

OK, you may be sneering right now, and this bilious piece of flyblown crap thoroughly earns your scorn. But here’s the thing. In the Arab world, some people just may not understand that any American has the right to assert that their duly elected President is a secret Muslim socialist. The “universal right of free speech,” which was affirmed in that original Cairo embassy statement, is a foreign concept to many radical people on our planet. To them, if this “film” exists, it’s because the U. S. ruler wants it to exist – otherwise, Obama could just snuff it out, like their leaders do in their own lands!

I haven’t seen all that much coverage of the many Muslim citizens who have condemned the murderous acts of their fanatic cousins, the Terry Joneses of the Islamic world. But they’re out there. They are just as ashamed of Osama bin Laden as we are of Fred Phelps, the nauseating GOD HATES FAGS guy. But, as we’ve been constantly instructed these past few years, whenever we oppose freedom in any sense, the terrorists win. That freedom is why this heinous video exists, and why its makers have blood on their hands, maybe even proudly. No, they probably didn’t kill Ambassador Chris Stevens; that may have been a back-burner plan which only used the video-induced riots as cover, just as we used 9/11 as cover to “do” Iraq. But by paying to translate their venom into Arabic, these zealots used their money, and the relatively new ability to communicate to the world, to forge a digital sword that quickly slew. It can no longer be sheathed. Shame on them for defaming a great, proud religion: Christianity.

Daisey, Changed

This has to be the week of progressives calling out their own. (Yes, poor “victimized” right-wing media, it does indeed happen.) First, Bill Maher airs a one-sided view of Mississippi and then compounds the error with an oafish election-night tweet. And Friday, the exemplary THIS AMERICAN LIFE radio program “retracts” the most popular story in its history, a piece by Mike Daisey about working conditions at Foxconn Technology in Shenzhen, China, where iPhones, iPads, and many of our other most prized devices are manufactured – mostly by hand.

The TAL piece was an excerpt from Daisey’s highly successful one-man show THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS, ending its encore run today at the Public Theater (the closing date is a coincidence unrelated to this incident). We saw it down there last December. The heavyset Seattle-based monologist employs a cadence, and dynamics, that remind you of DAILY SHOW contributor Lewis Black: he’ll talk softly for most of a sentence and suddenly SHOUT OUT a word or two, so you tend to pay attention. (I had previously seen his monologue 21 DOG YEARS, about his experiences as an early employee of Amazon.com.)

This time, Daisey’s topic is Apple Inc. First, how wonderful and magical their life-changing products are; and then about the human cost of manufacturing them in China, an aspect that has escaped most Apple customers over the years. (Other companies use Chinese labor as well, but Daisey concentrates on Apple.) I don’t know about you, but I always pictured iPhones and iPods being assembled by robot arms in giant white high-tech clean rooms. Not so. The work is done by hand, with mind-numbing and body-grueling repetition, at places like Foxconn, the mammoth campus which Daisey visited. By Western standards, cheap labor is being sorely misused, and no matter how hip the company – as Nike discovered years ago – its role ought to bring shame and embarrassment, especially if executives in the supply chain are aware of the working conditions, and how could they not be?

But there turns out to be a HUGE problem. Not only can’t Daisey corroborate certain events which happened outside his purview, he also lied to TAL’s fact-checkers regarding the very identity of his Chinese translator who was first to dispute the accuracy of his account – meaning he knew there was something there to be discovered. Here is a detailed look at TAL’s objections. Also note that by Chinese standards, most Foxconn workers, mainly poor migrants, seem happy to have their jobs, even working exhaustingly long shifts for a pittance; instances of abuse and physical harm (such as hexane poisoning) certainly exist but may be rarer than Daisey insinuates; and, most seriously, he can’t possibly have seen everything he says he did in one six-day visit. He is describing something true using a fictional method. Nothing wrong there – most enduring works of art operate that way – but look at his stern assertion in the next paragraph.

Daisey’s halfhearted defense seems to be, yes, but this is theater, I shouldn’t have presented it to TAL as journalism. In response, I’d like to quote two bold-faced lines from the Playbill I was handed as I walked in the theater door (yes, Virginia, there is a straight guy who saves all his Playbills):

THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION.
SOME NAMES AND IDENTITIES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT SOURCES.

If the root issue is real, and Daisey’s heart is in the right place – he has certainly worked and succeeded, through drama, in bringing consumer-electronics labor issues into the public consciousness, and there’s reason to believe things are gradually changing at Foxconn – then why is this so important?

I can trust that Daisey’s basic premise is true not because he says so (though I took him at his word back in December, per that Playbill disclaimer), but because it’s been corroborated by independent news and labor organizations, most notably the New York Times, whose reporters have filed front-page stories about working conditions in China (arguably urged on by people like Daisey).

I can assert that his presentation is at least in part fictional because of those same independent news organizations. In fact, Times reporters in China also questioned specific points in Daisey’s piece as unlikely. Even the one with egg on its face, THIS AMERICAN LIFE, had guts enough to do the right thing retroactively after making one fatal error: they should have never allowed the story on the air after being unable to contact Daisey’s translator.

News and opinion can exist side by side. Away from its editorial pages, which of course are all opinion, The New York Times indicates the difference instantly using typography: each day, any story with a justified-right margin is reporting, truth, accuracy; any story with a “ragged-right” margin, like the one you’re reading right now, is opinion or analysis. TAL itself has a coterie of bright, thought-provoking contributors whose subjective musings are clearly labeled as just that.

But the fact that TAL has fact-checkers at all shows you they’re trying to ensure that what they present as truth actually is. Political blowhards on both sides of the spectrum (world’s most unavailable job: Sean Hannity fact checker!) spout opinion so fast and so loud that some folks probably can’t be blamed for taking it seriously. But if, say, Bill O’Reilly states that something happened today, I’m gonna need corroboration. (He earned my skepticism by inventing or adopting specious news items for his silly “War on Christmas.”)

We need independent news, and thank God we still have some of it amid all the cacophony. Meanwhile, what of the dramatist?

When the lights came up after AGONY/ECSTASY, my wife used an earthier term to say, “He’s a hypocrite.” If he’s so upset, why does he continue to use Foxconn-made gear? And the stars in his eyes during the show’s opening moments, when he’s describing his own happy Apple addiction, are those of somebody who trades in for damn near every new model. We didn’t yet know that what we’d just heard had been juiced for dramatic power. But now I can’t help but wonder if he was telling the truth about Amazon in 21 DOG YEARS. So that’s something that Mike Daisey must share with Bill O’Reilly. No more trust; I now have to verify.

An Analog Problem With Digital Books

Looks like the Justice Department is taking an interest in the pricing of e-books by major publishers. The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Trachtenberg had the story yesterday, and the New York Times followed up this morning. DOJ is threatening a suit over the “agency model” of e-book pricing, in which the publisher sets the retail price and nobody is allowed to undercut it. Until a couple of years ago, e-books were sold under a “wholesale model,” in which the publisher sells for a set wholesale price, usually about half the “suggested” cover price, and retailers can discount however they like. (Physical books are still sold this way, which is why you occasionally see an e-book that costs more than a paper one.)

DOJ is investigating Apple and five major publishers (curiously, the largest one of all, Random House, is not listed; at first they balked at the “agency model,” but came around a few months later). Very broadly, they want to find out if the companies acted in collusion to prop up the retail price of e-books. I can give them a quick answer: yes, they did. But is that illegal? Here are the warring points of view:

Publishers: By deeply discounting our e-books to $9.99, below its cost, Amazon was deliberately trying to establish dominance and reduce competition, which could hurt everybody in the long run: if they were the only e-bookseller, they could raise the price as high as they wanted. Also, e-books are eating into our sales of physical books – our very business model is at stake.

Apple: Damn right. And Amazon is the big kahuna. (For the first time ever, we were a little late to this e-book party.) Level the playing field and stop these birds from using your product as a loss leader.

The Customer: What happened to our $9.99 e-bestsellers? You don’t have to print, bind, stock, ship or accept returns on them. $15.99 is an absurd price you just pulled out of your posterior.

DOJ: Yeah! Aren’t you guys all going into a huddle and setting prices? That’s a no-no, and it’s anti-consumer.

Publishers: No way! Each publisher is free to set whatever price it wants. It’s just become a floor, not a ceiling.

Amazon: Man, you’re foolishly dampening the only bright spot in the book business. And if it weren’t for our Kindle, you’d still be looking for a savior. If you depend on Apple for largesse, just remember what happened to record stores, back when Steve Jobs contended that keeping prices down was a good thing.

Literary Agents: Our clients’ compensation is based on a percentage of a sale price. Reduce the price and you reduce our clients’ earnings. Oh yeah, ours too.

Publishers: Yeah! We have to think about our beloved authors!

Amazon: That doesn’t seem to bother you on real books, where the free market works just fine.

Self-Published Authors: This just in: if you’re good, you can make a living selling e-books at $4.99, and to hell with all of you. If you’re no good, you weren’t gonna get a book contract anyway, especially since the big houses have basically given up on the midlist, and their last big idea was to use social networks for publicity. Well, duh.

DOJ: <Points two fingers at its eyes and then back to the publishers>

The Customer: Hey, gang, I’m still here. But maybe not for long.

E-Customers Creeped Out By Price Creep

There’s a piece on page 1 of today’s Wall Street Journal about e-book sticker shock, another good job by the Journal’s book-beat reporter Jeff Trachtenberg. I’ve been railing about this issue ever since Apple persuaded the six major publishers to disallow any discounting by retailers on e-books. As Mr. Trachtenberg points out, this restriction doesn’t apply to print books, so you have the increasingly common phenomenon of e-editions equaling, and even surpassing, the discounted print edition at retailers like Amazon.com. In at least one instance (emphasis on “at least”), Ken Follett’s doorstop FALL OF GIANTS, the publisher’s e-book price is $18.99 – but the paperback edition can be bought new for $16.50.

Let’s re-emphasize what’s actually going on here. The major players in an industry which faces massive headwinds, book publishing, are deliberately overpricing their most promising and fastest-growing revenue stream, specifically to dampen e-demand and reduce “cannibalization” of “higher-margin” hardcover and trade paperback editions. Mr. Trachtenberg points out that under the “retail model,” by which Amazon was charging $9.99 for new e-bestsellers, it was the retailer who took the loss; the author and publisher still received roughly half of the full hardcover price. But under the current “agency model,” the publisher retains 70% of an e-book price which it alone can set, and the retailer gets the rest. No more “loss leaders,” and essentially no more $9.99 bestsellers.

But look closer at the Follett. Dutton’s suggested retail price for this 985-page tome in hardcover is $36. Under the “retail model,” it collected $18 per e-copy, just as it did for a hardcover, and Amazon could give it away if they liked. Of course, that’s no way to run a business: “How do we do it? Volume!” What Amazon was trying to do was to jump-start a nonexistent e-book market and worry about coaxing it into profitability later; they’ve always been forward-thinking in that way. But under the “agency model,” Dutton gets 70% of $18.99, the highest price I’ve encountered for a commercial trade e-book, which is $13.30 per e-copy, and all retailers receive the same $5.70 (I rounded both numbers to the next penny). $13.30 — and remember, this is the absolute Beluga of e-pricing — is $4.70 less than $18. But who’s counting?

My point exactly.

Now let’s consider Apple’s motives. It’s a wonderful company, but it’s no less ruthless just because its antagonizer-in-chief has passed away. When Apple was the “first mover” in digital music, it used the leverage of its huge installed iPod base to oppose the big record labels by dampening the retail price from $15-$16 for a whole CD to 99 cents for an individual song (boy, that price rings a bell. And it’s increased since then, too). But in e-books, Apple found itself, uncharacteristically, in Amazon’s wake (Steve Jobs had infamously sniffed at the Kindle’s launch: “People don’t read any more”). So now what it had to do was eliminate Amazon’s price advantage – and, amazingly, in a reversal of its effect on the music business, it succeeded in propping up the retail price of e-books! Justice is now looking into whether preventing discounting constitutes illegal collusion among the major publishers (as are European authorities), and I don’t know much about the law so can’t speculate, but it does sound fishy, and it protects retailers (guaranteed profit) at the expense of consumers (higher prices).

I have some friends in the book biz who’ve read my previous musings and have some pretty good arguments that nobody seems to be considering. For example, it’s an age-old fact that for big bestselling authors like Mr. Follett, or Stephen King or John Grisham or Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts, publishers pay way too much up front as an “advance (against earned royalties),” otherwise known as a “guarantee.” First, it’s necessary because everybody else is waving huge paychecks around, and you have to be there to compete. Second, a major author can be a tentpole for the rest of your list: if you, Ms. Retailer, want the new Grisham, you’ll have to hear about all the other great stuff we have. Third, there’s the intangible prestige factor, as authors and agents want to be with the house that publishes XXX. But these millions represent a nonrefundable sum which has to “earn out” before a book realizes its true potential for perennial profit down the road. (I’ve heard that Mr. King has a deal which plays down the guarantee in favor of a larger participation on the back end, like major movie stars sometimes do.) A surprise hit like THE HELP is very profitable immediately, but big bestsellers from well-known authors always start out deep in the red, and I’d love to know what Kathryn Stockett’s agent has in mind for her next contract.

That means you have to scramble for every penny you can find during the hot new-release period with the ads and the DAILY SHOW spots, very much like movie studios do. My question is: why aren’t the big publishers doing so?

Mr. Trachtenberg quotes a publisher as saying people are realizing the advantages of e-books and are willing to pay a premium for them. I’ve heard that too from some consumers. But $18.99? (P.S.: Book prices never go anywhere but up.) He shares more ominous quotes from others. A reader says it’s hard to justify a $10-$15 e-book when you can pick up a used print copy for $2 or $3 on Amazon. If that was the Ken Follett, the author and publisher made no money on the used-copy resale, when they could have received $18 for a “retail-priced” e-book. Also, the ability to self-publish and shop online is hitting the major publishers from the low end. As an industry consultant says, some e-buyers may opt for “five-star-reviewed” self-published mysteries or romances which are going for $2.99 or $3.99. Plus, if it’s digital it’s stealable, and remember that millions of otherwise law-abiding kids believed downloading from Napster was justifiable because CD prices were too high.

I think it’s fair to say that most e-reading devices have been purchased since “agency pricing” went into effect about two years ago, so possibly it’s only the early adopters like me who recoil against $12.99 and $14.99 books, or e-editions which cost more than paperbacks. Most new e-reader owners may think that’s the going rate you pay for not having to lug the physical book around, being able to read it on damn near every mobile device there is, etc. Yet as a “veteran,” I’d still be willing to wait, even a whole year, so the publishers have time to sell every hardcover they possibly can, if they’d only then give me a fairly-priced e-edition so I could fairly pay the author and publisher instead of ignoring them.

As it is, I have a list of backlist books that I’ll never buy in print editions; I just want to read them once. Every month or so I check on them, and every so often a publisher will experiment with a temporary lower price (this is why the publishers will probably survive any accusation of price-fixing; each one is free to charge whatever it likes). Either I will get the price I want, or the publisher will lose a sale which I would guess is sorely needed. It’s as simple as that.

EDIT, 2/7/12: I have tried Dave Slusher’s program BuyItAtThatPrice, discussed in the comments section. It works like a charm, and the email that alerts you when the price of a book (and probably anything else on Amazon, but I’ve only used it to buy e-books) has been lowered to your satisfaction also includes a link directly back to the item’s Amazon page, so it’s delightfully easy to use. I heartily recommend it. Thanks, Dave.

Do E-Books Cost Too Much?

Nice piece by Jeffrey Trachtenberg, the Wall Street Journal’s book-beat reporter, in this morning’s paper. (It’s behind a paywall, but see if you can’t snag a print copy.) He points out what ten minutes with a calculator revealed: as best we can tell, publishers’ margins are greater on e-books than printed editions. In other words, the e-tail is wagging the p-dog.

As best we can tell, because books aren’t identical, like boxes of Tide. Each one is different in so many ways: trim size, page count, paper stock, press run, etc. But “a back-of-the-envelope calculation,” as Mr. Trachtenberg puts it, shows that on a generalized Everybook, the publisher retains more money on the e-edition than on the print version. He also notes that electronic books don’t require inventory or shipping expense, or reserves for returns. Yet prices of new releases in digital format have been rising since the start of the year, and by now he’s seeing negative reviews of e-books on Amazon that have nothing to do with the content. Just the price.

There was a time when Amazon could set a $9.99 price for new e-releases, because the company was trying to establish its Kindle as the e-book standard. To do that, however, Amazon had to be prepared to lose money on every sale. Retailers generally pay half of the cover price using the “wholesale model,” so on a $30 book Amazon would remit $15 to the publisher. By selling for $9.99, it’s losing $5.01 on each copy sold. Retailers call an item priced below cost a “loss leader”: its purpose is to increase traffic in general. (Loss-leading can certainly go too far: a couple of years ago there was an absurd pre-Christmas price war in physical bookselling that briefly reduced Stephen King’s $35 doorstop UNDER THE DOME to $9.00. Remember the old joke: “How do we do it? Volume!”)

You might think this would be just fine with the publishers; who cares if Amazon is selling for less than it’s getting? But having watched Steve Jobs undercut record labels and set $.99 as the de facto standard for a single downloaded song (he’s raised that price since then, but the point is that the “album-model” labels were accustomed to selling 10 songs at a time, whether you wanted them all or not), publishers were worried that the price of an e-read was being devalued just as it was cutting into hardcover sales, and their previously ineluctable power to begin the calculations with a suggested retail price was being threatened. They actually ran into Jobs’s embrace when the iPad appeared and Apple offered to sell e-books using an “agency model,” under which the publisher sets the price and the retailer, acting as sales agent with no discounting ability, coughs up 70%. The Apple bookstore itself hasn’t made much noise. But because all the big publishers have now adopted its agency model, Apple has, for all practical purposes, ended the age of the $9.99 e-bestseller price point. Amazon still discounts physical books – they continue to be sold via the wholesale model – thus driving the retail price downward. But it has no control over the price of the corresponding e-book, and as that price point rises to compensate for fewer physical books being shipped (it’s strictly Return To Sender at Borders these days, dude), the disconnect is becoming increasingly evident. For example, Amazon will sell you a copy of Dick Cheney’s new $35 tome for $19.20, but the e-version will cost you $16.99.* Does that make sense to anyone besides the publisher? Mr. Trachtenberg reports that it is beginning not to.

Some caveats. It takes dough to bring out a major release. Vice President Cheney did not write his book for nothing (sit down there, you in the back!). It also had to be edited, set in type, proofread, “sold in” to whatever booksellers remain, promoted so we’ll all know about it, and in the case of physical books, printed, bound, shlepped back and forth, and so on. Bringing out the first copy is a tremendous expense, and I don’t begrudge the publisher for clawing every possible dime out of an initial release. Also, some authors are using e-distribution to self-publish at very low price points, a couple bucks a shot, because they don’t have that tremendous overhead. A few talented, prolific writers are making some money that way, but in 99 out of 100 cases, they are self-published for another very good reason. You still need big publishers because they hire sharp-eyed editors, so you won’t have to read those other 99 books.

But Mr. Trachtenberg’s piece is only concerned with new releases, what the industry calls the “frontlist.” Our math will really start to look funny a little later, when the book has had its hardcover run and goes into paperback — increasingly, “trade” paperbacks at about half the retail price of the hardcover; “mass market” books, or the identically-sized ones on cheaper paper that spin around on racks, are continuing to lose ground as a publishing format. To get the paperback version, mind, again we have to print, bind, shlep, etc. Even if the hardcover was a flop and the publisher decides to “strip and re-bind,” using the innards of returned copies for paperback pages, it still ain’t free. But the printed paperback will be sold to the retailer and customer at a drastically lower price. However, guess what: in most cases the e-price won’t budge an inch. Thus, Amazon continues to sell C STREET by Jeff Sharlet in hardcover discounted to $17.63. Now there’s a paperback edition for $10.75. Yet the e-price remains $12.99 – more than the paperback reprint. I don’t mean to knock this particular book or publisher, because they’re far from alone. Shop around and you’ll see. Forget the hardcover: “agency-priced” electronic books cost more than their own paperback reprints.

In other words, there’s no digital equivalent of “waiting for the paperback” at the six largest publishers. They offer a cheaper print alternative, but still calculate their lower-overhead electronic editions based on full hardcover retail price, even a year or more later, when most of the production expense has already been amortized. As with movies and records, you pay full freight if you want to be one of the first, if you want to enjoy a new release while everybody’s talking about it. But those other forms of entertainment will give you a break if you wait a while, until their marketing spotlight has turned onto something else. And, as we’ve seen, the book business does that too – except for the e-book format.

Well, as Mr. Trachtenberg points out, the customer is starting to notice all this. And I’ll concede that the publishers are having to make this up as they go along. As one of them said while mulling the agency model, “we have no idea how to set prices.” They’re not Procter & Gamble, they’re publishers. But if they don’t come up with some kind of sensible e-backlist policy, as the e-price rises to greet the hardcover price, the fastest-growing segment of their business will begin to look too rich for our blood.

10/4/11: Today I bought C STREET for my Kindle, and one other recently backlisted nonfiction book from a different publisher, for $9.99 each. If you’re experimenting with dynamic pricing, mates, please accept my congrats — and, more importantly, my dough.

12/16/11: After waiting patiently for more than a year, I bought my e-copy of Keith Richards’s LIFE today for $9.99. That’s plenty fair in my book: you wanna save, you gotta wait. Props to the publisher. (Just for fun, click the link above and see if the Kindle price is still $9.99 when you read this. You’ll know something I don’t.)

*A-version will cost you nothing.

My Phone Is Smarter Than I Am

A small HarperCollins delegation had gone to Daytona to meet with the NASCAR people down there. Great day-trip: they even took us onto the racetrack! But when we got to the airport, there was a big storm in New York, and our return flight kept getting delayed. That’s what airlines and the FAA do, death by a thousand cuts, pushing back the “scheduled departure” an hour at a time. At each further delay (we finally had to spend the night), my colleagues whipped out their cell phones to update spouses and such, eventually letting me borrow one too. That was the day I said, I gotta get one of those things. And I’m not alone: ever noticed there are far fewer pay phones left in airports?

Even though I joined the party late, it’s getting hard to remember doing without. But unlike most people, I’ve only ever required two duties of my mobile phone: (1) remember everybody’s number, and (2) call ‘em whenever I say. Just the basics. BlackBerry, iPhone, all the razzle-dazzle technologies passed me by. A “dumb” phone was fine by me – and by the way, the ringer ought to sound like a frickin phone, not Britney Spears. Boring? Sue me.

Then something happened. I snapped. Late last year, I suddenly got tired of reading about all these amazing “apps,” and asked my brother John, a big shot at Sprint (ironically, his company is now deep into NASCAR after buying Nextel, then the fairly new sponsor of stock-car racing’s most valued prize), to cure my app impotence by recommending a tricked-out smartphone and signing me up. Good call, bro: I haven’t had this much fun since I hooked up my first modem.

My new phone. Dude, it's awesome!

My new phone – an HTC 4G arglebargle (I admit it, I wasn’t really paying attention, whatever John said was fine with me) – can remember numbers and call folks, duh, but it can also remember emails, even addresses, and give vocal driving directions to any of those frickin addresses, turn by turn! It can scan bar-codes and tell you where you’ll find a better price. (Be discreet if you actually try this in a real store: clerks are getting hip, and they understandably don’t like such indoors window-shopping.) It can add a movie to my Netflix queue before the EBERT review is over. Identify a song if I but hum the tune. Find the closest Mexican restaurant or ATM, anywhere. Give me a five-day forecast for damn near any place I can imagine. Respond to voice commands if I’m just too lazy to tap the screen. And do a lot of other stuff that I’ll probably never, ever need. I took my phone into the room where Linda was enjoying a nice peaceful tub-soak and made it say, “Do you enjoy bathing yourself?” in French. This may be yesterday’s news to all the yutes out there, but the little dickens is multilingual; for all I know, it could have greeted her in Klingon! (Linda’s reaction was far more prosaic, as you may have already guessed: I shan’t be doing that again.)

My bitchin’ new phone runs on Google’s Android operating system. It’s not an iPhone, so there exist some iPhone apps which aren’t available to me – yet. But I haven’t found a single essential app that doesn’t already have an Android counterpart, and it turns out there are more Android devices worldwide than i-operating system devices, so application developers nowadays pretty much have to include us. Just like baby boomers! We went to Hong Kong more than 15 years ago and were astonished at the swarms of businesspeople waiting at every traffic light, each clutching an attaché in one hand and a tiny cell phone in the other. And that was a long time ago. Broadband is probably the one technological area in which America lags behind the rest of the world, but I’m so new to all this that I’m still dazzled, even at our “slower” speeds.

There is a learning curve; you betcha, grampa! My old mobile phones used to work like clamshells (Motorola RAZR, anyone?): they rang, you just flipped up the ear-part and said, “Hello,” as if you were Captain Kirk. You hung up the way he did, by snapping it shut again – I always thought that was beyond cool. Now, this one’s a touch-pad and doesn’t bend in half, not in the slightest, so you must resist the urge. You have to answer an incoming call with your thumb. Takes some getting used to. (Now the ringer sounds like frickin wind chimes, but I’m so digital that I don’t care any more. A telephone sound is suddenly so 20^th century!) I have had to train my thumbs to join the wide world of texting, because you can’t use one of these little buggers to its full extent without typing on it. Fair enough. But it has this maddening habit of suggesting words to me, finishing off those I’ve laboriously thumb-typed in ways I never expected – how does “ran” become “ranger”? – and I only discover it once I’ve already hit SEND. In this sole and single case, Mr. Smartyphone is rather simpleminded: you have to go very slowly, and gradually teach it all the words you like to use. Otherwise, you feel like that poor stammering king of England, the phone constantly exasperating you by trying to finish your words before you can, usually incorrectly. Sometimes you do want to kill it. But then it turns into an FM radio or a flashlight, and it’s your cute little puppy again. Did I mention that you can YouTube your ass off? Or read anything you’ve ever bought in the Kindle store?

Little things impress me. The background screen saver gives me a visual interpretation of the weather when I first wake the phone up. It drops hi-def snowflakes and frosts up the corners when it’s snowing, there’s a windshield wiper when it’s raining, digital fog when it’s cloudy. It shows blue skies on a sunny day, the encroaching darkness of twilight, and finally, the Poe-like blue-blackness of night, the barren, star-specked sky illuminated by what can only be the inescapable werewolfian moon. Yes, teacher, you’re right: I could just look out the window and daydream like I used to. But the screen on my new phone is so much cooler. I sat in a Utah movie theater waiting for a Sundance screening and approved some comments, even slowly thumbed out a reply, for another post on this very blog, which I’d always visualized as “residing” here in my New York apartment. Not so. It’s everywhere in cyberspace. For me, that was a profound realization. Damn: even Utah?

Do I sound overly infatuated? I guess it’s because I’m the equivalent of the caveman dropped into modern times. Let me have my fun; it’s harmless. I’m sure I still don’t know half of what this baby can do. But I can’t wait to find out more.

Coming Soon: New York Times E-Bestsellers

The New York Times announced today that it will begin printing weekly e-book bestseller lists beginning next year. The Times is the gold standard for bestseller lists, by far the most prestigious of them all. When these lists begin appearing, pay special notice to books issued by Random House and its many imprints. This is the only major publishing house which has resisted Apple’s “agency model” for selling e-books, thus allowing e-retailers to set whatever price they choose. In Apple’s model, the publishers set the prices.

This equates to a $9.99 (loss-leading, for the retailer) price point for the electronic editions of most new Random House hardcovers, including the recent books by John Grisham and George W. Bush. That price alone helps you identify a Random House title. With most other publishers, the e-price on a new hardcover is $12.99, $14.99, $15.99 and north. Some publishers even have the gall to charge more for an electronic edition than for the paperback reprint, and I’m sure they think they’re being smart by implicitly dampening e-demand in favor of more lucrative hardcovers. But once again, making it more difficult and/or expensive to buy your product is bad marketing, always has been, always will be – especially when it’s the fastest-growing segment of your industry.

For veteran users of electronic readers, there’s a knee-jerk resistance to an e-edition for sixteen bucks. It reminds us of the way record companies used to gouge their customers before Apple’s iTunes made it easy to buy individual songs, as cheap as $.99. (Note that iTunes retail prices have begun to creep upward; now a single is $1.29, and Taylor Swift’s new album, the hottest record in America right now, costs you $13.99. This is why many people are flocking to Amazon’s digital music store, where the same album in MP3 format — indistinguishable to all but audiophiles — is $3.99!) Newer users, like those who get their first e-readers for the holidays this year, won’t know the difference. I talked to one lady this summer, an ardent Kindle user, who said she didn’t mind paying a premium for the electronic edition, because of the convenience and the ability to satisfy an impulse: a book can be hers before she’s even finished reading the review. OK, we want to know how many people bite at the higher price point, whether it really makes a difference to business in general, whether you can make money by letting the retailer go as low as he likes (Random House, and just about every marketer of packaged goods in the world), or whether early adopters were unwisely coddled with an unsustainably low price point (Apple, and most other publishers). We need to know — and very soon now, we will.

So here will be the fun with the coming Times e-lists. Will $9.99 Random House titles dominate? Today’s Times also reported that George W. Bush was blowing out in its digital edition. Compare its e-price with the physical hardcover, even discounted. Grisham’s new novel, the first to go digital upon release (and, to be fair, a return to his bread and butter, the legal thriller), is also rocking the Kindles. Is the price point a tailwind for these e-editions? Next year, we’ll have much more information to help us find out.

March 2011: This month, Random House joined the rest of the major publishers in switching to an “agency model” and setting its own prices. Goodbye, $9.99, and we’re now routinely treated to the spectacle of e-books which cost more than paper editions. Separately, HarperCollins has placed a limit on the number of times an e-book can be lent by libraries. Some libraries have struck back by boycotting the publisher’s e-titles.

April 2011: In two separate stories, we get the first indication that e-pricing does make a difference in sales, and Amazon opens the Kindle to library lending.

Ham Radio For Dummies

I got my first personal computer at age 36. Commercially-made microcomputers had barely been around for ten years. Nowadays, kids in early grade school are already pounding on their consoles. Not until the first generation of kids who have known these machines all their lives, who take their supercharged productivity for granted, begin to run things, will we discover computers’ true potential. (The game-changing fact that schoolchildren can all of a sudden all type will be the subject of a future post; the last of the MAD MEN-era bosses who never learned to type are dying away.)

The IBM Displaywriter, ready for keyboardial action.

Back then, microcomputers were just emerging from the hobbyist era. Most individuals didn’t own one or want one. We used computing devices, like my dedicated IBM Displaywriter word processor, which allowed me to write and deliver ad copy without error, via its green-on-black display. Only the folks at Wang bothered with a black-on-white display like the one you’re reading now. They also wrenched the rectangular monitor onto its side to accommodate entire legal-sized pages at a single glance. After enough people had used word processors for enough time, it turned out that the IBM design, also employed on its personal computers, was tres rotten: constantly shifting vision from the positive space on your paper printout to the negative space on the screen was really bad for your eyes. Goodbye, green-on-black; hello, Apple’s Graphical User Interface and mouse, later imitated for the Microsoft world by Windows. (I found out that Stephen King, a guy who processed lotsa words back then, did it all safely, using what he called his “big Wang.”)

The unhealthy little green letters.

But Windows was still in the future when I performed my initial boot. Electronic mail hadn’t yet taken off (only the government used the nascent ARPAnet, which morphed into the Internet), and online commerce was still a decade away, waiting for somebody to invent a “browser” for the “World Wide Web.” Aside from playing crude games (I loved the clever text-only adventures from Infocom, which was handy, because the graphics capability of my first multipurpose machine, a Compaq running MS-DOS, was next to zero), there was really no compelling reason to buy a home computer if you didn’t spread any sheets or process any words.

Then I plugged my modem into the phone line.

I had sprung for the full monty, a screaming 1200-baud number. The little green letters scrolled horizontally faster than you could read them: amazing! The sales person had given me a couple of phone numbers for local bulletin boards, and I discovered an arcane subculture. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

Kids, a “bulletin board system,” or “BBS,” used to be a means to share messages and files over a single dedicated phone line. Only one user could be on at a time, and you were usually allotted a certain number of minutes per day. There were only four or five credible BBSs in Jackson, Mississippi back then; some of them were attached to companies, so not much interesting was going on unless you happened to work there. The best one by far was “MacHaven,” run by a man named Ray Leninger (he was the System Operator, or “Sysop,” in the parlance of the time). Ray hosted with a Macintosh, hence the name, but that didn’t matter; most everything was in ASCII characters, which every machine read.

Ray Leninger today. He ran the best doggone BBS in Jackson.

Ray was running Red Ryder software (I know because I asked him a little while ago), written for the Mac by Scott Watson. Ray says the original Red Ryder was one of the first, if not the first, “shareware” programs; it evolved into Red Ryder Host, which is what he was using, then into Second Sight. All the tough coding to send and receive information had been done by Watson: all Ray had to do was to personalize the bulletin board, and he had a wonderful idea. He imagined his virtual structure as a literal home, and named the various sections for rooms: the “Living Room” was where you might talk about thus-and-so subject, the “Game Room” was where you found a particularly addictive text-based dungeon game, and the “Back Porch” was for aimless chitchat. Ray could partition message areas, public and private (I think the Back Porch was by invitation only). “MacHaven started its life on a 1200-baud modem,” says Ray, “a step up from the 300-baud I’d been using for my personal communication. Over the years I upgraded to 2400, and eventually a blazing 9600 baud! (Compare to today’s typical DSL/cable modem operating at 300,000 baud.)” But still, like I said up there, back in the day we thought 1200 was smokin’!

The concept of being a guest in Ray’s home, “walking” through the various rooms, made MacHaven’s electronic innards completely transparent, the whole experience reassuringly familiar to non-techies like me. At first, you’d trade messages with other users, and the various personalities would emerge, then particular likes, like movies or music. Keep in mind that while you were online at MacHaven, nobody else could be, because the single-line modem was engaged. I believe each user was allotted one hour per day, and people fell into calling regularly at certain times. If you left a message, you wouldn’t see replies until the others had taken their turns. Since it was a local phone number, there was nobody much calling from any distance away, so MacHaven informally self-selected for Jacksonians.

As a few months went by, I’d show MacHaven to friends visiting my house, let them log on as guests and play for a while. They became absolutely addicted, and finally there was a real reason to buy a computer. (These sales helped to get people to quit tying up my phone line.) I think Ray Leninger and MacHaven personally sold about ten machines to friends of mine; too bad he wasn’t on commission. But aside from those people, I only knew MacHavenites by reading their messages. This is fairly commonplace nowadays, and the Web makes everything faster, but back then it was brand new and ridiculously easy: ham radio for dummies. It’s the same feeling as you get from Facebook: “friendship” and a certain distance simultaneously. Like most everybody else, we had at least one “troll,” an unpleasant guy who basically did not act like the guest in Ray’s home that he was. I think this is one reason we started the exclusive Back Porch, for some fresh air without this irritant, and before long we were finally meeting face to face at monthly Back Porch lunches, which continued after I moved away to New York, along with a bigger annual party, one I never got to attend: “An odd assembly when I held the MacHaven Labor Day Bashes,” says Ray. “Lots of people who seemed to be unable to speak without a keyboard.” Plus ça change, right?

Towards the end, Scott Watson’s software supported TWO phone lines, but Ray didn’t have the capability. He did make one expansion, though, joining the newly connected FidoNet, which let MacHaven users communicate with people on other FidoNet boards all over the country. (Including, ta-daa, me, in New York!) There was one catch, though: it took time. “My BBS would call a hub every night and drop off any outgoing messages and pick up any incoming,” Ray says. “It was like a 4-5 tier network, so it might take 4-5 days for a message to be delivered and 8-10 to get a reply!” It didn’t matter, though: the communication power alone was mind-blowing, never mind any potential for good. I remember my brother Rick and I getting into a private chat room on CompuServe one day and having the most inane ten-minute conversation at the laborious rate of 1200 baud. We signed off, and two seconds later the phone rang: Rick. “Wasn’t that cool?” Phone calls were suddenly so Victorian. The chatting experience hasn’t changed in decades – it’s a very popular part of Facebook.

In New York, I found a new “home board,” the Invention Factory, run by Michael Sussell, where the experience was similar, even to the point of dinners with fellow users every month. Our little chitchat partition and dining society was called “No_Carrier,” and it wasn’t private, just self-selecting for people who could speak without their keyboards. These guys were far more hard-core techie than I, but they were still friendly and funny, and they made a great chowder society for this recently-transplanted New Yorker. You might notice a smart, savvy sf/rock & roll aficionado named Ken Houghton commenting on this blog from time to time. Well, I met Ken on the Factory board and in person at the No_Carrier dinners. We’re still good buds, 25 years later.

My first email address was provided by the Factory: tom.dupree@factory.com, just about the time email was exploding out of the government’s ARPAnet and being popularized by forward-thinking BBSs like the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link in California. I hardly knew what to do with it. But the Internet was charging hard. Both MacHaven and the Invention Factory signed off about the same time, in the mid-90s. They had each lasted a little over ten years. (The domain name “factory.com” is now owned by a bland, faceless wholesale business.) By then, everybody had an email address, mostly at work, and communicated over their companies’ local area networks. But that dial-up modem connection sound (you can still hear it on some fax machines) can still bring back memories.

I remember connecting with Sir Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, before individual email came to Bantam Books, where I worked. I brought my AOL disk into the office, installed it on the one PC that was hooked to a dial-up modem, and “talked” to Sir Arthur that way. I’d ask him a question through AOL’s email system, go home, go to sleep, come back the next day, and there was the answer from Sri Lanka. We excitedly agreed that the setup was highly science fictional – and this was the guy who first proposed the geostationary communications satellite! The lag time was half a day, but to us that was heaven, because neither had to worry about the other being asleep. Little did we know that this was only an interim stop in the most significant revolution in communications ever. But the Internet rose up almost instantly, in retrospect, and in January 1997, at a new job, I became the first employee of the Hearst Book Group to have my corporate email address printed on my business card. Peeps, that’s almost yesterday – yet now, the email address is all you really need.

There have been many storied folks and fortunes attached to the computer industry, which actually fulfilled Bill Gates’ dream of a machine on every desk, and at head-spinning speed. But it was the hobbyists like Ray and Michael who really showed me the enormous potential for not just work, but fun, that was inside these danged disk-spinners. And they did it for love, not money. Thanks so much, guys. Over and out.

P.S.: It didn’t fit up there before you met Ray, but I asked him to read this piece in advance to fix any errors, and I’ve got to show you how he fixed a whopper! I’d originally written: “Goodbye, green-on-black; hello, Windows and mice.” This devoted Mac user replied: “The Graphical User Interface (GUI) was brought to the masses by Apple on the Macintosh. The hard and fast DOS generation saw it as a toy — why would anyone want to have to use a mouse to drag a file to a folder when you could just type copy “D:\Documents and Settings\MY.USERNAME\My Documents\myfile.txt” “E:\MYBACKUP\My Documents\newfile.txt”? It didn’t take Bill Gates long to realize that Steve Jobs would take over the mass home/education markets if they didn’t embrace GUI. My thing, I know, but I hate to see “Windows” given credit for it.” Imagine my forgetting to acknowledge the Mac GUI in a piece about MacHaven!

The Best Picture Of The Year

The 48^th New York Film Festival opened last Friday night with the world premiere of David Fincher’s latest, and it couldn’t have gotten off to a stronger start. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is the best flick I’ve seen all year, including everything I saw at Sundance, and maybe for longer than that.

Zuckerberg.

By now everybody knows that it’s a partly fictional take on the Facebook origin story, done without Mark Zuckerberg’s cooperation. And you wouldn’t think college-age geeks typing on keyboards would be at all interesting: even with Ally Sheedy, Sandra Bullock, or bloody Angelina Jolie staring at the console, cinematic computer nerdage has always fallen wicked flat. But Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay just crackles: if a more Oscar-worthy job shows up by the end of the year, it’ll be a miracle, because most Oscar-winning scripts aren’t this good. The opening scene sets the pace, the motormouthed Zuckerberg facing off verbally with a date he’s desperately and clumsily trying to impress. Not only doesn’t he know what to do with her, but his knee-jerk smartest-guy-in-the-room retorts also dig him ever deeper into romantic purgatory, until you want to tump a pitcher of beer over his pitiful, arrogant head. But in Sorkin’s world, she’s his rhetorical equal, and Zuckerberg will acknowledge that by re-gifting one of her better smackdowns a little later.

You’d expect that kind of 21^st-century chamber colloquy from Sorkin. The news flash is David Fincher. He has matured so gracefully that you rarely see a “Hi, Mom!” moment any more; he’s still way stylish, but confident enough to assume willful transparency, like Spielberg on his best behavior. Fincher’s storytelling sense has never been better demonstrated. This is potentially overwhelming stuff, but he and his screenwriter have dragged it onto the turf of Shakespearean heroes: love, devotion, envy, hubris, greed, betrayal, and most of all, our old pal obsession. (Countries aren’t at stake, but fortunes are, and that’s how we keep score today.) Nearly all of it emerges from the prosaic settings of a college campus and a nutso work-pad in Palo Alto, but against all odds, the film’s two hours fly by like something in your peripheral vision, until the haunting, powerful final moment.

All actors are superb, most of them flinging Sorkinisms at a rapid pace, especially Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg (his best performance ever), Justin Timberlake as Silicon Valley macher Sean Parker (ditto), and Armie Hammer (yes, a scion of the legendary Armand) as a pair of identical twins who claim that Zuckerberg stole Facebook from them – and thereby, dear viewer, hangs our tale. Rashida Jones has a nice latter-reel part as the one character who ushers “Mark Zuckerberg” into a place where the audience might find a scintilla of empathy. Don’t feel bad if you can’t.

Eisenberg.

Which leads to the meat. The movie stays frosty by switching from conference-room depositions in two separate lawsuits against Zuckerberg to flashbacks of the actual events being described; the editing is so sharp that sometimes this happens in the middle of a sentence. I don’t know how much is fact and how much fiction, but if the real Zuckerberg was betting on this one being a soon-forgotten turkey, he loses. He was evidently afraid he’d come across as an asshole. He had good reason. Facebook is busy denying everything it can, and Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark, New Jersey schools is, shall we say, interestingly timed.

Yet I feel for him – and it’s clear David Fincher, a former enfant terrible and smartest guy in the room himself, does too. For weal or woe, this movie will outlast all protestations, and millions of kids who don’t know any better will take it as the wide-eyed truth. Some may even recall it from the depths of their multitasked brains as a strange sort of documentary. In olden days, we understood perfectly well that Oliver Stone was tarting up JFK and Nixon, but many, if not most, Facebookers won’t have a similar perspective. Zuckerberg has a right to complain. How many of you would care to have your awkward college-age hijinks dramatized for the whole world to see? Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were spared that indignity because the world granted them time to grow into their positions. Not Zuckerberg. It all became too big too fast. Still, many people would probably trade looking like an asshole forever – Mark could turn out to be the 21^st century’s real-life Charles Foster Kane, after all – in exchange for several billion dollars, and that’s with a B, bitch. (Mark’s infamous business card – “I’m CEO, bitch!” wasn’t invented by Sorkin.) Then again, on the cab ride home, Linda uttered heresy by wondering aloud whether Facebook would still be king of the hill, or even around at all, in, say, ten years. Or, she got me to thinking, would it just twitter away in time, leaving nothing but, uh, lipstick traces, the wispy remains of once-mighty passing trends like CompuServe, MySpace, Blockbuster, or Barnes & Noble? All we know for sure is that things fall apart; the center cannot hold, not even by dint of Zuckerberg’s prodigious will. Simply surviving will require many more shrewd and lucky decisions, and the kid’s still looking up at thirty.

Meanwhile, this movie is marvelous; I attach my very highest recommendation. See it as soon as you can. Topping it this fall will require lots more than a period piece about a royal speech impediment. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is actually important, a hi-def snapshot of our moment, guaranteed to be a contender at Oscar time next year and revisited frequently thereafter, yet urgently appropriate right this second.

March 2011: Well, the royal speech impediment did rather well at the Academy Awards, didn’t it? But that still doesn’t make it the best picture of the year.