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We’re back!  In our first Litopia After Dark of the season we’re talking about the pitfalls of self-publishing and the plunging sales of the gossip magazine.  We also cover freedom of speech as Random House pull a novel by Sherry Jones called The Jewel of Medina.  Our regular Amazon spot is back and this week we look at Audible’s impending launch of an imprint to showcase titles from indie publishers before they’re published and we chat about the built in obsolescence of the Kindle.

On our panel this week are Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman and Martyn Daniels.  You can find Martyn’s last appearance on Litopia After Dark here and visit his blog at Brave New World.

Litopia Daily returns on Monday, tune in to listen to a comprehensive news update.   And we missed you in the Ustream chatroom on Friday (7.30pm GMT), come along next week and join in with the live show.

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Links mentioned in the show…

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Jack Kapica…

Publishing has changed irrevocably since the advent of the World Wide Web. The tech revolution suggested that all we need is a computer and an Internet connection, and our writing would be published, and read by millions.

But of course a computer does not make anyone a writer, the same way that a camcorder does not make a movie director or Guitar Hero make a rock star. Eventually, it turned out publishing on the Web wasn’t quite as thrilling as we wanted to believe.

Instead, technology is leading us back to our roots: The Web is now jammed with sites that offer to turn your manuscripts into books at little cost.

This trend suggests that Web-based publication has become a noisy agora of dubious quality that has cheapened good content. Of course, some people still regard books as having more prestige than online text — it seems politicians running for higher office need books to add heft to their reputations.

Michael Savage in The Independent…

The Brangelina twins have arrived, Madonna will enter her sixth decade tomorrow and we are in the midst of the latest series of Big Brother. But despite the glut of celebrity gossip, sales of celebrity magazines have hit the buffers.

Titles such as Heat!, Closer and Reveal saw their sales plunge, in the latest figures from the Audited Bureau of Circulation.

The success of gossip websites, the economic downturn and growing apathy towards Big Brother were responsible for the collapse, industry experts said.

In The Independent, Robert Verkaik…

British libel laws are stifling free speech around the world as wealthy businessmen and celebrities increasingly turn to UK courts to silence their critics abroad, the United Nations has warned.

In a report published yesterday, the UN’s Committee on Human Rights criticises the phenomenon of “libel tourism”, where foreign businessmen and millionaires use the High Court in London to sue foreign publishers under claimant-friendly defamation laws.

It said that UK defamation law had discouraged critical media reporting on serious public interest matters, affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work.

Hillel Italie in Business Week…

Salman Rushdie strongly criticized his publisher for pulling a historical novel about the prophet Muhammad and his child bride over concerns about angering Muslims.

Rushdie, whose “The Satanic Verses” led to a death decree in 1989 from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and forced the author for years to live under police protection, said the Random House Publishing Group had allowed itself to be intimidated.

“I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have canceled another author’s novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals,” Rushdie said Thursday in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”

Random House has acknowledged pulling Sherry Jones’ debut novel, “The Jewel of Medina,” about Muhammad and his child bride, Aisha. The publisher, which had planned to release the book this month, said in a recent statement that “credible and unrelated sources” had warned that the book “could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

On Thursday, Random House spokeswoman Carol Schneider said, “We certainly respect Mr. Rushdie’s opinion, but we stand by our decision, which we made with considerable deliberation and regret.”

In Publishers Weekly, Rachel Deahl…

In partnership with the Center for Independent Publishing, Audible is launching an imprint that will showcase titles from indie publishers before they are released in print. Through Audible IndieFirst, Audible will become the exclusive audio publisher of the sort of titles that usually don’t make it into the spoken-word format, releasing them as audiobooks a month prior to their print publication. The imprint launches this month with the Akashic Books title Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno, and plans to release at least 12 titles annually. Audible IndieFirst titles will be available at Audible.com and iTunes.

In The Register, Bill Ray…

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader will sell more than 380,000 in 2008, according to analysts at CitiGroup. UK retailer Waterstones agrees that e-books are the future and is putting Sony Readers into its high street stores.

The Kindle figures are based on positive reviews of the product as well as the way it’s still topping Amazon.com’s best-selling list. Analyst Mark Mahaney reckons a Kindle is going to be the must-have item for this Christmas, pointing out that his predicted sales are roughly the same as those achieved by the iPod in its first year, particularly impressive as the Kindle can only be sold in the US as it requires access to the CDMA network over which its whispernet connectivity operates. He also reckons that by 2010 the Kindle will be contributing $1 billion annually to the online-bookseller-turned-everything-emporium - four per cent of their total revenue.

Richard Cohen on washingtonpost.com…

On an average day when I am here, I amble over to the Boulder Book Store. Often, I simply browse — it’s a very good bookstore — and sometimes I buy something, but mostly I just like the feel of the place. It has a cafe and lots of specialized sections, and recently I watched my granddaughter as she observed a yoga lesson for children. I bet they don’t do that over at Amazon.

Instead, over at Amazon they are inadvertently thinking of ways to make the world worse for children and for the grown-ups who love them to pieces. What Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wants more than anything is to do away with the book as we know it. “Jeff once said that he couldn’t imagine anything more important than reinventing the book,” said Steven Kessel, one of Bezos’s top guys. Kessel is in charge of digitizing everything in sight.

Nothing more important than reinventing the book? Not ending world hunger? Not taking Rush Limbaugh off the air? None of these? What’s wrong with the book? I understand that it’s bulky and expensive to ship and that it entails the consumption of paper, which is probably not green, but then what is? The book has been around for a very long time (Google the exact number of years, please), and I love it so.

The book is warm. The book is handy. The book is handsome to the eye. The book occupies the shelf of the owner and is a reflection of him or her or, actually, me. The book is always there, to be reached for, to be thumbed and, too often, I admit, to wonder about: Why did I buy this? My bookcase is full of mysteries.

Tags: getting published, manuscript, publishers