Chad Taylor

Ghosts


The Haunted Life by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics, 192pp) is a novella written in 1944 and (probably) mislaid by the author in a Columbia University dorm room. The pencilled manuscript came to light in 2002 when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. Editor Todd Tietchen has collected it here with a detailed introduction as well as supporting fragments from Keruoac's work and his father's correspondence. You could skip all that and go straight to the story but the accompanying material shines a light on it.

As Tietchen notes, 1944 was a turbulent year for Kerouac. His friend Sebastian Sampras was killed in action. The author was jailed on an accessory charge (later dropped) and he made the acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

By contrast, The Haunted Life is a modest coming-of-age story about Peter Martin, a young man living in a romantically fictionalised New England town. Caught between the Great Depression and World War Two, Peter is leaning towards an intellectual, roaming life. He is deciding, in other words, whether or not to become Jack Kerouac.

"Someday, we'll sit right down in some old jalopy and drive right out to Fresno, California," says his friend, 19 year old Garabed Tourian. The author would begin On The Road six years later.

The Haunted Life is a young man's story in every sense. There is a palpable tension around rebelling against the traditional male roles of worker and soldier, and the form of the novella itself is a rebellion: less predictable than a short story but refusing to conform to the conventions of the novel.

Some of the dialogue has curdled over time. The characters' thoughts are limited to those of the author aged 21, and their declarations clunk. Rather than "say" the characters cry, choke, prompt, mumble, mutter, chide and so on. But when they shut up and let the author write, the prose takes off:

"Field smell, flower smell, and the smell of cooling black tar in the night. The air misty and drooping with its weight of odours, the river's moist gust of breeze... The radio next door, Mary Quigley and her girlfriend from Riverside St dancing to a soothing Bob Eberly ballad in the living room littered with new and old recordings."

Critics can argue about the importance of the manuscript but this is straight up good writing. It's the ardent voice of the male spectator: the Kerouac people will continue to shoplift and read and talk about.

Sunday Star Times, 13.04.2014 Pic: Kerouac in 1943 c/- Wikipedia

Tales of madness


Chris Bell has a new collection of short stories out, The Concentrated Essence of Any Number of Ravens. You can read about it here and buy it here. The fifty-odd stories (some of them, very odd) are short and varied and fun. Disclosure: I wrote the foreword, because I like his stories. His other books include The Bumper Book of Lies and Liquidambar.

Authors have been a-Twitter about RJ Ellory using online pseudonyms to praise himself and criticise his 'rivals'. (In a post on his Facebook page, Mark Billingham called it 'the tip of the iceberg.') The scandal reminded me of James Frey being caught out for fabricating his autobiographical A Million Little Pieces. Writing fiction is personal and private and, above all, slow, but the online world advances publicly, 365/24/7, 140 characters at a time. If you're going to turn fiction into a competition, don't be surprised if authors start doping to keep up.

Many of the actors in the trailer for the new movie version of The Sweeney appear to be palsied: slurred speech, facial paralysis, wrecked physiques. The contrast between the actors' stasis while speaking and the action extras is extreme to the point of comedy, like a Steven Seagal flick. The Sweeney is one of a number of recent UK movies that have been produced almost exclusively for local consumption (St Georges Day is another): the sort of drama that no longer finds a natural home on British television.

The trailer preceded David Cronenberg's movie of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis which I enjoyed for the spectacle of a director sublimating all his obsessions to serve an author's voice. Claustrophobic and precise, Cosmopolis felt like a coda to the themes he explored in other films: biomechanical worlds (Videodrome), addiction (Naked Lunch), technological fetishism (Crash) and decay (The Fly, Dead Ringers).

I also finally caught up with A Dangerous Method which, like A History of Violence, is a pretty conventional narrative that suddenly pops with violence and sex before healing over again. A friend of mine remarked that you never worry about Sean Connery in a movie because you know he's really James Bond: when the monastery was burning down in Name of the Rose, you knew he had a jet pack under his cassock. Cronenberg suffers from a similar, if inverted, typecasting: sitting down to watch one of the director's movies you find yourself bracing for the very worst. When the three stern, uniformed nurses manhandled the screaming, muddied Sabina (Keira Knightley) into a room to merely bathe her, the audience slumped with relief.

Readers


In 1983 Nobel Prize winner-to-be and Greg Bear fan Doris Lessing wrote a novel under the pen name 'Jane Somers' to test publishers, their readers and critics:
'I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that "nothing succeeds like success," [Lessing] said in a recent telephone conversation from London. 'If the books had come out in my name, they would have sold a lot of copies and reviewers would have said, "Oh, Doris Lessing, how wonderful." As it is, there were almost no reviews, and the books sold about 1,500 copies here and scarcely 3,000 copies each in the United States.'
From The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
Could you tell us more about how you put the Jane Somers hoax over on the critical establishment? It strikes me as an incredibly generous thing to do, first of all, to put a pseudonym on two long novels to try to show the way young novelists are treated.

LESSING
Well, it wasn't going to be two to begin with! It was meant to be one. What happened was, I wrote the first book and I told the agent that I wanted to sell it as a first novel . . . written by a woman journalist in London. I wanted an identity that was parallel to mine, not too different. So my agent knew, and he sent it off. My two English publishers turned it down. I saw the readers' reports, which were very patronizing. Really astonishingly patronizing! The third publisher, Michael Joseph (the publisher of my first book), was then run by a very clever woman called Phillipa Harrison, who said to my agent, "This reminds me of the early Doris Lessing."
Lessing believes that by the time the novel was published, 'four or five' people knew the secret.
We all expected that when the book came out, everyone would guess. Well, before publication it was sent to all the experts on my work, and none of them guessed. All writers feel terribly caged by these experts — writers become their property.
Jane Somers earned mixed reviews:
A lengthy review of ''If the Old Could. . .'' in The New York Times Book Review last June, for example, said the novel ''fails to achieve greatness.'' But, the reviewer added, ''This is an extremely courageous attempt, and Jane Somers is a courageous writer.''

The Washington Post's reviewer said of ''The Diary of a Good Neighbour'' last year, ''Jane Somers extends one's comprehension of the possibilities life offers, and does it with wit and compassion.''

But The Los Angeles Times's reviewer found ''If the Old Could. . .'' a ''cryptic novel.'' It is, the reviewer said, ''a little like a beautiful sweater made by a woman with arthritis. Through unravelings and dropped stitches, you can make out a lovely pattern, but can't quite figure out what it is.''
Nowadays Lessing's concerns seem quaint. Publishers are more than willing to gamble on unknown writers, and lately they have been betting large:
Gabriel's Inferno and Gabriel's Rapture, popular books that started as Twilight fan fiction, have been acquired by Penguin's Berkley imprint in a "substantial seven-figure deal,” the publisher announced.

Berkley will immediate take over publishing the ebooks from Omnific Publishing. Trade paperbacks will follow in the next few months, with Berkeley planning a 500,000 copy first printing.
I once asked an editor what sort of book sells half a million copies. He smiled: 'Nobody knows.'

UPDATE: speaking of best-selling franchises: Grace Bello interviews Ryan Nerz about ghostwriting Francine Pascal's young-adult series Sweet Valley High:
Nerz: Sweet Valley High is this series that just goes on and on and on. So you're always having to come up with new plots. You're always having to come up with new character arcs. We would just sit around and come up with new ideas. And then they would hire out freelance people, like what I eventually became. You get a one-off amount of money, which is okay. Meanwhile, Francine Pascal sits in a château in France. I'm not even sure if Francine Pascal wrote a single book, which is really funny. She just came up with the idea and the Bible for it.

So the titles that you wrote, did you pitch those ideas?

No; the would-be writers, we would have to do a two-chapter sample, about 30 pages. They have to see that you can match the style and the tone and pull the heartstrings of anonymous 13-year-old girls across the country.

Were there a lot of men writing?

There weren't a whole lot of men. There were few men, predominantly gay, and one other guy, Daniel Ehrenhaft, who now is a fairly successful young-adult writer. Other than that, no. There weren't many men. It was mainly post-college women. That was the main ballgame. There were some dudes. But not a whole lot.
Read the full interview here.
(Pic: Fay Godwin)

Tick of the clock

"You only get one chance to make a first impression—and that one chance with a reader lasts only minutes. It's no longer acceptable for a book to "get good on page 40." From your first sentence to the first pages of your novel, it's critical to hook readers immediately—whether that reader is an agent, editor, or patron in a bookstore. Not only do you want to quickly pull readers in with your story, you also need to establish your narrative voice as reliable, believable, talented, and authoritative. So how do you best accomplish this? In this brand new webinar, instructor and literary agent Kate McKean will show you how to catch a reader's eye with your first sentences and pages."
As an old advertisement's headline ran: "Quick -- who has the razor?" The illustration below the headline showed commuters on a railcar, one of whom was black. The African-American wasn't the one holding the razor but your eye was drawn to him first, which was the advertisement's message: first impressions are unreliable.

Kate McKean's pitch looks good, but see if you can spot the razor. It's at the start. Of course there is only one chance to make a first impression: if you had a second chance, the impression would be the second, or later impression. The opening phrase is a truism: the premise is not logical. Pick at things after that and they begin to unravel.
It's no longer acceptable for a book to "get good on page 40."
Kids these days. But when was it ever acceptable for 'a book to "get good on page 40?"' The Bible gets cracking pretty quick. As does Dickens. So do the pulps, so did Mills and Boon. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. If you think about it -- if you allow your mind to wander -- you will realise it's difficult to locate a period when it was ever 'acceptable for a book to "get good on page 40."'

But going with Kate: acceptable to whom?
 whether that reader is an agent, editor, or patron in a bookstore 
Nub ahoy. And note the order: this is not about you. This is about a busy agent looking for product. In Kate's case, "contemporary women's fiction, middle grade and young adult fiction of all stripes, craft, sports, and pop culture." This is not reading; it's shopping.

In my experience the editor reads with a more general view, i.e. how does this fit my list. Sure, they want the book to start well, but they're hardly panicky OMG types. Who knows what they're looking for? Pray you find one who likes your voice. (The other kind of editor -- the sub or copy editor -- is being paid to stay awake.)

As for the patron in a bookstore, their hansom cab waiting on the pavement outside... Really? A lot of people won't pick up a book if they don't like the cover. Many read the first page: just as many flick through. My father's mother would turn immediately to the last chapter, but she was a woman who could take the fun out of anything.

But I digress. Quick, who has the razor?

Writing has to work and it has to last. It drives me insane when people cook up moden lite recipes for the act of writing as if creativity is a commodity to be farmed and groomed and sold in bulk. The movie industry has been starving itself on fad diets like this for decades -- Robert McKee's Story, Syd Field -- and now the same crazes are threatening prose writers, boxing them into the same narrow stalls. Look at the wretched state of the movie business. Is that what you really want your work to be like -- concocted in a blitzkrieg of panic about whether or not it will be instantly liked?

If it is, here is Kate McKean's webinar Awesome First Pages: How to Start Your Story Right.

If not:
A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it. A well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes.
-- Aristotle, Poetics

Binding

Wired's John C Abell says ebooks are not there yet because they can't be used for interior design:
Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle?

It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don't keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.
Abell's comments reminded me of a 2010 study which aimed to gauge the effect of summer reading on students' academic performance. A philanthropist interviewed about the programme mentioned, albeit anecdotally, the importance of building a physical library:
For a study to be published in Reading Psychology, Richard Allington [a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville] and colleagues selected students in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida and, for three consecutive years, gave each child 12 books, from a list the students provided, on the last day of school... Three years later, researchers found that those students who received books had "significantly higher" reading scores, experienced less of a summer slide and read more on their own each summer than the 478 who didn't get books.

Rebecca Constantino, [a researcher and instructor at the University of California-Irvine] who in 1999 founded Access Books, a group that has given away more than 1 million books, says the cause-and-effect is simple: "When kids own books, they get this sense, 'I'm a reader,' " she says. "It's very powerful when you go to a kid's home and ask him, 'Where is your library?'"
The full report of the study is here. (Pic: The Big Sleep. Based on the book.)

Depending how you see a thing

Movies may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.

Some of this anti-art bias reflects the glorious fact that film has always been a popular art form, a great democratic amusement accessible to everyone and proud of its lack of aristocratic pedigree. But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo.
A. O. Scott on movies in the New York Times.

Strangers making the most of the dark

A lot of people lament how the publishing industry has changed over the years. Your career seems to very much bridge all that - from the small independent shops to the corporatization of it all.
I say to Bob Gottlieb, who's still a very close personal friend, "You couldn't stand to be in publishing today." And he says, "I know." It is very corporatized. We all began to think about that in those days. What was going to happen? These big conglomerates, synergy, all that. People began to worry about it.

Tell me about some more of the big characters.
We just don't have them anymore. Morgan [Entrekin] is as close as we have. And Sonny [Mehta]. There were so many: Henry Robbins, Ted Solotaroff, Joe Fox, Sam Lawrence, David Segal. Even Dick Synder is a lot more colorful than Jack Romanos, who is now gone. I mean, they had passion, they cared about literature. Even Dick, who's not an intellectual. He cared. He was a madman. I mean, we need a little bit more…. Who is a madman now in publishing? Peter Olson, but of a very strange type. I mean, Morgan's eccentric, Sonny's eccentric. Morgan's less eccentric than he used to be. He's getting very conventional now with the wife and the child. It was just different then.

So you miss the personalities.
Yes. I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.

So why was that lost?
It's the corporate thing. People are too scared.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler's 2008 interview with agent Lynn Nesbit.

When I was down you just stood there grinning




Major book chains are closing up. Meanwhile in France (pictured) where the selling price is fixed by publishers, book stores are still open for business. Note also that retailers lease fewer than four floors, don't serve coffee or sell CDs and DVDs. So Amazon has won... at least until governments (= consultants) decide the postal service isn't financially justifiable.

A London publisher told me about the Christmas when Amazon UK demanded that they cut their prices. The publisher refused, so Amazon switched off the 'Buy' buttons on all their titles. The publisher refused to back down and Amazon caved – eventually. Stories like that make me like bookstores even if they are a chain.

I'll remember Borders in Auckland for stocking my novels (ta Chris B) and wish the staff well. If the Civic premises are going to vacated, now is the time for a DKD revival.

Also on the theme of change The National Enquirer has been staking out Steve Jobs. I don't want to know and I'm not going to link to it but I do want to point out that the last time a reporter pulled this kind of stunt the Tooth Fairy bit his lips off.

Add your voice to the sound of the crowd

Three articles on authors and social media. From last year, Daniel Kalder writes about why authors should and shouldn't use social media:
Social media are great enablers of the magical thinking that afflicts authors and publishers alike. What do I mean? Well, consider the following essential truths about publishing: crap sells, except when it doesn't. Quality never sells, except when it does. Good men die screaming in the gutter; the wicked flourish. To quote William Goldman: nobody knows anything. Given that we live in a state of total chaos, it is only natural that individuals study the chicken's entrails for guidance. What's that spelled out in the guts? Blogging! Facebook! Awesome! What could go wrong? Blogging is free, plus you can subvert the hierarchical media model and go direct to your readers. Wait for it, but here comes the magical thinking: Hey ma, lookit me! Any minute now I'm going to go viral and everybody's going to buy my book!

It's not only authors who entertain such dreams. Publishers do too. Actually, chances are that if you do write something that goes viral, it'll be the blog itself, not your name or your book. People will read your masterpiece and a few seconds later click a link taking them to a Brazilian baby with amazing samba moves. Blink once, twice, your "viral" blog is forgotten. Believe otherwise and you are in for mucho disappointment.

Resist magical thinking.
Full article is here.

More recently, Anis Shivani suggests shunning it all:
These "rules" totally go against every prescription for writing success you'll hear as a young writer from all quarters: the conformity-driven MFA system, the publishing industry's hype-machine, successful writers who act either like prima donnas or untouchable mystics, the marketing experts who seek to impose advertising rules on the writing product. Overpaid editors, illiterate agents, arrogant gatekeepers, and stupid reviewers want you to bargain away your soul for a pittance -- the bids in the market escalate downward, a reverse auction where you compete with the lowest of the low to be acknowledged as an entity that counts.
Full article is here. (Tip of the hat to Crime Watch.)

And from Cory Doctorow a report on what happens when the new model backfires:
Six years ago, Diane Duane started to ask her readers if they'd be willing to subsidize her next book through subscriptions as she wrote it. Things went great for a while, and then they didn't. Diane's health, circumstances, and life went through a long, bumpy patch and her book went off the rails.
Now she's finished it, and put it online with a long and heartfelt apology to the readers who'd backed her.

This is an important -- and underreported -- problem with "micropatronage" and "street performer protocol"-style artistic experiments. Writers are often late with their books. Sometimes they're so late that the books are given up for dead. [...]
This is normal, and we know how to deal with it in the world of traditional publishing. But in the world of public writing-as-performance where there are hundreds or possibly thousands of people with a financial stake in the book -- people who aren't editors at a house with 400 books under contract, but rather people who've never been around a book during its creation -- it gets really difficult and sticky.
Full article here.

Miss January, and the future of publishing

When I killed Twitter a friend consoled me by saying, well, the only thing you ever posted about was writing. Marginalia is the opposite: my scrapbook of distractions: movies, TV, January Jones' black eyes like a doll's eyes. (Actually they're blue but the show is graded.) So if you follow this blog, 2011 will be more of the same. When I had a home my wall was pinned with all kinds of crap. Thanks to technology, anyone can share in my Many Wastes of Time.

But then last night I was nosing around the torrents, as you do, and wondered, hey, what .epub files are out there? And in less than ten seconds I had downloaded three commercial best sellers. The speed itself was unsurprising: the total works of Shakespeare are around 5 megabytes – less than a single pop song at 128kbps – and the books in question were around 500k. I've been told by programmers and developers that DRM protected ebooks are easily cracked, which makes sense: the format is XHTML, which is designed for sharing, and its contents are text only, with maybe a cover graphic.

The ease of access was enlightening. If you are faced with the choice of buying an ebook for the hardback cover price or downloading it for free faster than you can cough, is the "new" publishing business model sound? Computer users are more savvy than ever, networks are faster, storage devices are of greater capacity and cheaper – and the commercial object being illegally traded is, proportionally, smaller and easier to hack. We're talking the average size of an email here. Publishers may be trading on the basis of free distribution sooner than they think.

JJ pic c/ GQ, as per usual.

I am not a number

A fan as I am of exploitation cinema the buck stops when it exploits writers. Collider has done a good job of covering the I Am Number Four movie but the skinny comes from New York Magazine's piece on James Frey's young adult fiction factory which originated the work. The terms being offered the writers who work on these pieces are odious. Writes one potiential participant:
The Authors Guild got back to me with serious concerns over the contract... I later spoke to Conrad Rippy, a veteran publishing attorney, who explained that the contract given to me wasn't a book-packaging contract; it was "a collaboration agreement without there being any collaboration." He said he had never seen a contract like this in his sixteen years of negotiation. "It's an agreement that says, 'You're going to write for me. I'm going to own it. I may or may not give you credit. If there is more than one book in the series, you are on the hook to write those too, for the exact same terms, but I don't have to use you. In exchange for this, I'm going to pay you 40 percent of some amount you can't verify—there's no audit provision—and after the deduction of a whole bunch of expenses." He described it as a Hollywood-style work-for-hire contract grafted onto the publishing industry—"although Hollywood writers in a work-for-hire contract are usually paid more than $250."
Read the article - it's all in the fine print. I was cautious about criticising Frey for the Million Little Pieces fiasco because it wasn't clear whether he volunteered to lie about the book's veracity or was coerced into doing it - and also, the man's so far away from me in space and income that I couldn't really bring myself to care. But I've revised my opinion: James Frey is a gold-plated prick. If you boycott one movie this year, make it I Am Number Four.

Have you got anything left to say before I shoot myself

The above is poster advertising a book (or 'printed entertainment') as displayed on the London Underground. The book - that's it down there in the corner, see? - is titled Even. I'm guessing Even is a story of revenge, probably starring Agent David Trevellyan who is motivated to seek revenge when someone steals his life. Because Agent David Trevellyan's life is his - not theirs - he's angry but instead of getting angry like you and I might do, Agent David Trevellyan will get even. Sure enough, Even is the title of the book. That's probably Agent David Trevellyan talking in the poster - or rather, quoted, because if he was actually talking you would hear his voice in your ears above The National on your iPod. Agent Dav - oh, look, I can't be bothered typing it again because there are so many letters in it omg it goes on 4eva but Even, it's called and it's about this guy who gets even. Do you follow? If you can't, try reading the poster again. But don't move closer to read it because then you would fall on to the tracks, and that would delay the Northern Line.

I like a thriller as much as the next man but if the people you're selling the book to are truly this hard of understanding then reading the thing will be fucking hard going, unless it has a lot of pictures in it, or the pages are blank.

By contrast, drinkers are approached with this level of sophistication:

You don't need to be smart to drink. Why do you have to be a moron to read a book?

That new familiar feeling

Whitcoulls have launched the Kobo ebook reader and software platform in NZ. The tech has been reviewed in Engadget:
Kobo... doesn't plan on making a big splash in the actual e-reader market, since it's primarily about building branded software and delivering branded e-book stores for others, including manufacturers.., and booksellers...

As far as software and capabilities, the device is utterly barebones, but at least it keeps its aesthetics throughout, and everything seems responsive and intuitive. There's no 3G onboard (you sync your e-pub titles with a desktop app over USB), no specific word on storage (our guess is in the 1GB to 4GB range), and there don't seem to be any other activities available to reading books.
As an author I have many questions and so turned (clicked) to the Whitcoulls site FAQ. And got:

Why do I not feel optimistic?

DRM free copies of your favourite New Zealand novels now available at secondhand bookstores throughout the country, at less than $12-17.

Update: Apparently Kobo books don't reside on your hard / flash drive but rather stay "in the cloud." Fail. Have no interest in paying a cell phone company's wireless data fees every time I want to read. iPod Kobo app = gone.

Lexi-con

David Bellos, writing in the New York Times, explains how Google Translate works:
Google Translate can work apparent miracles because it has access to the world library of Google Books. That’s presumably why, when asked to translate a famous phrase about love from “Les Misérables” — “On n’a pas d’autre perle à trouver dans les plis ténébreux de la vie” — Google Translate comes up with a very creditable “There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life,” which just happens to be identical to one of the many published translations of that great novel. It’s an impressive trick for a computer, but for a human? All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement.
Which is interesting not only because the Translator is a Turk, because while an original work may be in the public domain a publisher's translation of same can be copyrighted for separate and much longer terms. In which case, would Google have resort to such translations beyond "fair use?"

I guess it's all too late now, anyway.

Not Books

I've written before that the paradox of book publishers' e-book strategy is their plan to use disruptive technology to preserve the status quo. Nicholas Ciarelli takes the argument a step further and says recent developments in the ebook pricing war prove that what publishers really want to do is turn back time:
The fact is that publishers do not need consumers to embrace higher prices because this move isn't intended to sell e-books, it's intended to sell more physical books.
Read the article here at Daily Beast.