Felix Salmon

Back in January, Google’s Eric Schmidt was dismissive when asked about whether he had any interest in buying the New York Times, although he did say he was interested in doing a peculiar thing where he would “merge without merging”, whatever that meant.

In any event, it seems to have meant that when a real opportunity arose, he spent a good deal of time looking at it:

Scott Galloway, a Web entrepreneur and New York University Business School professor who is one of two Harbinger appointees on the Times board, made an overture to Google co-founder Larry Page about Google buying the Times Co. Even though Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly lamented the state of the newspaper industry and dismissed the notion of Google investing in it, people involved said the company looked seriously at the opportunity before deciding to pass.

My feeling is that there’s no point in Google talking to Harbinger: unless and until the Sulzberger family has serious interest in talking, it makes essentially no difference who owns the B shares. But at that point, there are all manner of interesting structures which might be created, some of which might well involve Google’s charitable arm, Google.org. Schmidt’s claim that he didn’t want to mix philanthropy with business was always the least convincing part of his claim not to be interested in the NYT.

Back in March, I wondered why the NYT was breaking the web, yet was hopeful that it was some temporary snafu, and that it would be fixed sharpish. But no — it’s still insanely broken, and Thomas Crampton is only one of hundreds of journalists who have seen their careers thoughtlessly erased by an idiotic marketing stunt.

This hits home for me, because, between now and then, my name was summarily erased from more than 4,000 blog entries at Portfolio.com, when the site hired Ryan Avent to replace me. Now, everything I wrote has Ryan’s name on it instead of mine. You could call it erasing my career, I suppose. It can be fixed quite easily — if Portfolio.com stays up, which it’s far from obvious that it will — but I’m told there are no staff available to fix it.

In general, web publishers care much, much less about preserving their archives and honoring incoming links than you’d ever believe possible. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s those of us who are paid by media companies to write things online who tend to bear the brunt of those actions. Maybe we should start insisting on adding clauses to our contracts, whereby we’re automatically given our archives and full rights to republish them wherever we want, the minute that incoming links get broken or the site goes down. Such clauses shouldn’t be necessary, but sadly I think they probably are.

Robert Gavin of the Boston Globe interviews his own publisher today, and for all the pro-forma statements that the Globe isn’t going anywhere (“the Globe will still be publishing a year from now – and beyond”), the matter is explicitly and entirely out of his control:

The paper had just completed the reduction of 50 jobs in the newsroom when the Times Co. called union leaders together and threatened to shutter the Globe unless they agreed to major concessions. Ainsley said that decision was made by top executives in New York and that the Globe’s losses, coming on top of the dismal first quarter for the Times Co., likely forced their hands. He described it as the likely cause, because he said he doesn’t know exactly what the reasoning was.

“That wasn’t my call, that wasn’t my decision. That was made at the upper reaches of the company so you’d really have to ask them,” he said.

If you read the whole article, it’s pretty clear that the Globe is losing an enormous amount of money right now; that it has essentially zero chance of being profitable at any point in the foreseeable future; and that the chances of anybody wanting to pay good money for it have gone from Jack Welch to zero.

Given all that, it seems to me that the Globe is surviving mainly on an unsustainable mix of nostalgia, pity, and desperate hope, mixed with a certain quantity of noblesse oblige on the part of the Sulzbergers. I put the over at 14 months, and the under at nine.

I subscribe to three daily newspapers: the WSJ and NYT get delivered on dead trees to my door, while the FT gets delivered electronically to my Kindle, ever since I got given the Amazon reader for my birthday last month. I also read all three on the web. But when it comes to off-web weekday reading, the Kindle is trouncing the dead trees, at least in terms of the amount of my attention it’s getting. It’s much smaller and lighter and more convenient than a newspaper — it’s easy to dip into on the subway or in other pockets of dead time.

With a larger Kindle coming this week designed specifically for newspapers, I share a certain amount of hope that newspapers will be able to take full advantage of this new medium. On my wishlist: that the paper is updated more than just once a day; that the Kindle subscription can be bundled with paper and online subscriptions; that a mechanism can be found to easily email stories to oneself or to friends; and that there be some way of searching a newspaper for a story without having to try and work out which “issue” of the newspaper that story appeared in.

As for the Kindle more generally, my number-one gripe is its draconian whitelist policy when it comes to emailed books. At the moment, I can give you my kindle email address, and you can send me your book in electronic form, but that won’t do any good unless and until I add your email address to my whitelist. If you’re not on my whitelist, you don’t get a bounce message saying that the book wasn’t received, and I don’t have any ability to retrieve your book from some kind of spam filter. Instead, it just disappears. Once I add your email to my whitelist, any books you sent me before I added your email still won’t arrive.

The Kindle is a great way of sending books to journalists, who tend to have desks and bookshelves piled up with unsolicited books they’ll never lug around with them and read . On the other hand, if they’re easily accessible on the Kindle, they’re much more likely to be read. What’s more, if you email an unprotected PDF file to my kindle address, I can’t copy it or email it to anybody else: the book is perfectly secure that way. But because I have no way of turning Amazon’s whitelist feature off, you can’t just send me that book, because it’ll never arrive. With luck Amazon will fix this problem soon, and the publishing industry generally will start spending a lot less time and money sending out physical books to people who don’t want them and didn’t request them.

I’m ashamed to admit that I never read all of the long and famous Matt Taibbi screed on the financial system which I linked to a month ago. So faced with a plane ride tomorrow, I thought I’d read it then. Except, inexplicably, Rolling Stone has decided to horribly truncate it, and in its place I find this:

For Matt Taibbi’s complete report, including the people behind the crash and a look at those who stand to profit from it, check out Issue 1075 of Rolling Stone.

This is Not Useful: since that particular issue of RS came out, there have been two new issues (one with Lil’ Wayne on the cover, and one with the Kings of Leon), which means the only way I’m likely to be able to check out Issue 1075 is by getting myself to the library. And much as I love Taibbi snark, I don’t love it enough to do that.

I think it’s silly for magazines to truncate their articles online in the hope that readers will then go to the newsstand to buy the physical copy. And that’s what RS did as recently as February, when it was sensibly attacked by Choire Sicha for doing so. Magazines don’t compete with their own websites, they compete with everybody else’s websites.

But at least their was some logic to what Rolling Stone did in February: put the article out in print first, and then only online in full once the next issue hits the newsstands.

The new strategy makes no sense at all: first put the article out in full online, and then truncate it when it’s no longer on newsstands. Huh? What earthly purpose does that serve?

Update: If you want to read untruncated Taibbi, he’s got a classic piece of Friedman-bashing over at True/Slant.

Dan Gross’s e-book on the financial crisis is now out in paperback, just a couple of months after its release. (By contrast, his last hardback book still isn’t available in paperback, a good two years after it came out.) Bob Thompson gives the backstory in the Washington Post: how Dumb Money was commissioned as an e-book, and how come it came out in print so quickly. I asked Dan a few more questions as a followup, via email.

Felix Salmon: I see the paperback is being published by Free Press, which also published the e-book. Did they get an option to do the paper-and-ink version when they acquired the e-book rights?

Dan Gross: Yes, I think so. But the intent, on their end, at the beginning, was to see what would happen if they did this as an e-book exclusive.

FS: Bob Thompson says that “Success for an e-book exclusive, at least for now, means doing well enough that your publisher decides to sell physical books.” Would you agree? On a purely financial level, are you going to make more money from the paperback than you did from the e-book?

DG: No, I don’t necessarily agree with that. For both publishers and authors, there are lots of ways of defining success for a book — whether it makes money for the publisher, whether it makes money for the author (i.e. generates enough royalties to pay back the advance and then some), whether it establishes the author as an expert on a certain topic that can be monetized in other ways (speaking, consulting, new business), whether it makes an impact on the debate, whether it generates positive buzz for the publisher and author. To a degree, in many instances, the number of copies sold at Barnes & Noble is almost secondary to how I regard the success of any book I do. From my perspective, even if it hadn’t come out in paperback, I would have regarded Dumb Money as a sucess. It’s too soon to answer the money question, since all the royalties go into a single pot. Also, to a degree, everybody who has been writing books in the last few years *has* been doing e-books. Many books are offered in Audio form (delivered digitally) and for devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader.

FS: Other than the length, were there any differences between writing an e-book and writing a normal book? You’ve been writing for Slate for many years, did you want to put in lots of links? Or have e-books not reached that point yet? Insofar as there’s a difference between how you write for Slate and how you wrote when you were working on Pop!, where did this project lie on that spectrum?

DG: As far as writing the book, no big difference — aside from the fact that you don’t have to do an index for e-books. And, yes, I did want to put in a lot of links. A lot of the data and material was taken from my Slate columns over the years, and there are times when you think it would be nice to just linke to a table of, say, subprime mortgage origination numbers, or a chart of Toll Brothers’ stock, rather than spelling it out. You can convey a lot more information in a less boring manner with a link. But I don’t think e-books (at least not the format I was doing) are set up for links like that. That said, I do write a little differently online than when I do when I write in print — whether it’s Slate vs. Newsweek or an e-book vs. a hardcover. It’s not that you use less rigor — if anything, your need to get your numbers, facts, and quotes 100% correct is greater online than in print since so many knowledgeable people can pick it apart so easily. But rather you design your writing process for speed and immediacy, you develop a tendency to let go easier, you worry less about word count, and maybe a little less about rounding out chapters with cute endings. More declarative, less discursive.

FS: Do you know of any reviewers who read (or even received) the e-book, as opposed to the print galleys that we financial-journalism types were sent when the e-book first came out?

DG: This is one of the interesting tensions. The publisher printed up galleys when the manuscript was done, and those were the only hard copies anticipated at first. Why? Because the reviewing community still likes to see hard copies. Speaking as someone who reviews book, I sympathize. I find it easier to read longer works in paper than online, and I like to mark-up, underline, fold down corners of pages, and jot notes in the margin. We were also reluctant to send around a PDF of the whole manuscript because of concerns about leakage. Obviously, somebody can take a galley and scan it, and then post the whole thing online. But that doesn’t seem to happen too often. You could imagine, however, the PDF of a book making it’s away online with relative ease.

FS: Have you ever read an e-book? Have you ever reviewed one?

DG: I haven’t reviewed any. I read my own book on the iPhone, and I have read books in PDF form, which I suppose is a form of an electronic book.

FS:  Have you edited or changed the e-book in any way for the paperback version? Insofar as you have, have those changes also been made to the e-book version? How easy is it to edit the e-book now that it has already been released?

DG: The paperback is basically the same as the e-book. In theory, it would have been nice to make some changes, especially to the conclusion and to bring it closer to the present. But you’re still working against the old publishing clock if you do that. It takes several weeks to get the book manufactured, get it into the distribution chain, and onto the stores of bookshelves. So any tinkering would have delayed that process. As it was, about six weeks passed between the time it was available for sale as an e-book and the time it was available as a paperback. INot knowing much about the technical side of things, I would imagine it would be relatively easy to edit the e-book

FS:  Would you do it again?

DG: Absolutely.