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Tag: Stephen Page

Published March 11, 2014

Stephen Page: Past, Present and Future

The Bookseller has posted an edited transcript of a recent speech by Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, at the IPG and Publishing Scotland conferences:

One joy of digital is that it promotes thinking about all incarnations of reading, from the insubstantial to the disposable to the luxurious. We’re back to a place where we must imagine all the means we have of expressing value for a text. Where a reader will buy a £100 edition, let’s make that, and a 99p e-book where that’s appropriate… In the future we’ll spend a lot more time talking and listening to consumers. Whether they’ll listen will depend on our skills and the degree of fandom for the writer. If we’re successful, we’ll get a conversation going among consumers, and if we’re really skilful they’ll come back to talk some more. Having the systems and skills to do this will be the core to a publisher’s commercial opportunity, alongside taste.

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Published January 9, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

Ghost Shapes — Writer Warren Ellis talks comics and, very briefly, his new novel Gun Machine at Robot Six:

Gun Machine is as much about the ghost shape of Manhattan’s previous settlements and roadways as it is about its modern architecture, and the invisible channels of wireless communication around which that structure now bends. I see — or at least I look for — the foundations of deep time, and the deals we do with it.

See also: A.V. Club’s review of Gun Machine:

In Ellis’ world, everything is all-caps, all the time, and any character who can ask for a cup of coffee in a way that doesn’t call for at least one exclamation point is a spoilsport. Gun Machine, Ellis’ second prose novel, is in exactly the same style and spirit as his comics; like his first novel, Crooked Little Vein, it gives the impression that Ellis didn’t write it as a comic only because pictures would have slowed down the action.

Sounds about right. The book is also reviewed at The New York Times. (That fabulous cover for Gun Machine was designed by Keith Hayes designed by Oliver Munday with art direction by Keith Hayes by the way).

Be Still My Exploding Heart — Stephen Page, head of Faber & Faber, on the Penguin-Random House merger and what it means for the industry at large, at The Guardian:

Authors are talked about as brands in their own right, and this is correct. Publishers rarely achieve the status of becoming consumer brands of scale and significance. Is the next story for publishing going to be one dominated by global and local author and publisher brands, especially in niches? Authors and readers are at the centre of the world of books, and finding new ways to serve them will create further different structures. This merger may be seen as a starting pistol or perhaps an explosion in the heart of the old order dominated by the book trade.

Disposable by Design — Nicholas Carr on e-books and the apparent resilience of print books, at the Wall Street Journal:

From the start, e-book purchases have skewed disproportionately toward fiction, with novels representing close to two-thirds of sales. Digital best-seller lists are dominated in particular by genre novels, like thrillers and romances. Screen reading seems particularly well-suited to the kind of light entertainments that have traditionally been sold in supermarkets and airports as mass-market paperbacks… Readers of weightier fare, including literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, have been less inclined to go digital. They seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile pleasures, of what we still call “real books”—the kind you can set on a shelf. E-books, in other words, may turn out to be just another format—an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback. That would fit with the discovery that once people start buying digital books, they don’t necessarily stop buying printed ones.

An alternative, more circumspect, version of the article can be found on Carr’s blog:

None of this means that, in the end, e-books won’t come to dominate book sales. My own sense is that they probably will. But, as we enter 2013, I’m considerably less confident in that prediction than I was a few years back, when, in the wake of the initial Kindle surge, e-book sales were growing at 200 or 300 percent annually. At the very least, it seems like the transition from print to electronic will take a lot longer than people expected.

And perhaps most interesting of all, Carr has posted a series of exchanges with Clay Shirky and Kevin Kelly about the post.

Covering some similar ground, only bleaker, Dennis Johnson’s striking post on the slow death of Barnes & Noble is also essential reading:

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about all this is the fact that, as with the demise of Borders, the demise of B&N has nothing to do with what its customers actually wanted, what’s best for mother literature or free speech, or anything other than made-up trends covering for killer capitalism. There’s still plenty of evidence that people like bookstores, for example, and even sales of hardcovers — let alone print books — are holding on. And so the lust for higher margins — whether from Godiva chocolates or ebooks — turned into fool’s gold for B&N. It’s perhaps a typical death in the Free Trade era, when companies lose all sight of their identity in the blinding light of the bottom line … but it’s the wrong death for a bookseller.

Somewhere in there, Johnson quotes this article by David Streitfeld in the New York Times, which makes the rather chilling point about a demise of Borders in 2011. Not only did it have a negative effect on the sale of print books, it was bad for e-books too. “Readers could no longer see what they wanted to go home and order.”

Sigh…

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Published May 25, 2012

Something for the Weekend

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack — Tom Gauld has a Tumblr (The title is a reference to this of course).

Legacy Issues — Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, writing at The Guardian:

Let’s deal with technological obsolescence. Media businesses are not technology businesses, but they can be particularly affected by technology shifts. I run a so-called legacy publishing house, Faber & Faber. Most of our business is based on licensing copyrights from writers and pursuing every avenue to find readers and create value for those writers. We are agnostic about how we do this. For our first 80 years, we could only do it through print formats (books); now we can do it through books, ebooks, online learning (through our Academy courses), digital publishing (such as the Waste Land app) and the web. Technology shifts have tended to result in greater opportunity, not less.

Bibliophiles in London — The Economist on The London International Antiquarian Book Fair:

Most interesting, perhaps, is the air of optimism—there is not the slightest whiff of gloom at the state of the book world. The internet, paradoxically, has made books “à la mode”, says Claude Blaizot of the Librarie August Blaizot in Paris, purveyor of first editions of “Tintin” and fantastically bound livres d’artiste. “It has brought people to books, and shown them booksellers they never would have known existed before,” he says. Clive Farahar, the Antiques Roadshow’s book specialist, agrees that technology has opened up the book trade, and made the world of books much more accessible to all. “It’s not just the dim little shop on the high street anymore,” he said. “We can learn so much now we never would have known before.”

Simplicity — A two-part interview with Apple designer Jonathan Ive at The Telegraph:

“Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That’s not simple.”

(part two)

And finally…

Daniel Clowes at wired.com:

“Digital seems like such a step back from a printed book… For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I’m working. That is what I’m trying to create. That’s the work of art. That’s the sculpture I’m chipping away at, and when I’m finally done, I will arrive at that perfect 3-D object. The iPad version would be like a picture of the book, which doesn’t hold any interest at all for me. Even if I only had 10 readers, I’d rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.”

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Published January 13, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Fabulous Fury — Evie Nagy reviews Tarpé Mills & Miss Fury: Sensational Sundays 1944–1949 for The LA Review of Books:

Though Mills ostensibly hid her gender and wrote a high-adventure comic rife with guy stuff like smuggling, espionage, mad science, and gruesome murders, Miss Fury has much in it that seems designed to appeal to women as well. For one thing, the outfits are fabulous. As Robbins suggests, Mills clearly took great pleasure in dressing Marla, scheming villainess Erica Von Kampf, and other characters in elaborate gowns, lingerie, and smart but finely detailed sportswear. Modern superhero comics tend to focus on the intricacies of high-tech costumes at the expense of civilian clothes; Miss Fury, by contrast, is midcentury clothes porn.

Fucking Great — British film director Beeban Kidron remembers Magnum photographer Eve Arnold who died recently aged 99:

She was an early adopter of colour – favouring a thick negative with rich hues and simple compositions – and she ruthlessly edited her own work with a wicked sense of humour. “It’s not that we’re so great, it’s that the others are so fucking mediocre.”

See also:

A slide show of Eve Arnold’s work at The Guardian.

Eve Arnold remembered in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, The New York Times and The Economist.

The best Typefaces of 2011 from FontShop and the most popular fonts of the year from MyFonts.

Forward! — Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, writing for The Guardian on the way ahead in publishing:

[T]he men and women engaged in publishing need to be bold and exuberant. This is an extraordinary age for writing and reading, and it seems to me that this endeavour will go better if it’s done with a sense of purpose and pleasure, rather than defensively. It won’t turn out well for everyone currently in the business, but so what? If publishing is useful and creates value then it will be of value, whoever is doing it.

And finally…

A lovely profile of  Peter Hardwicke, one of the last traditional signwriters in London’s East End, in Spitalfields Life:

I am an old school signwriter that likes to talk directly to the client to select the fonts and the colours. I’ve found it a rewarding way to work, dealing with independent shopkeepers. I like to look at the built environment and choose fonts that are sympathetic to the architecture and the surrounding cityscape. I look at the other shops and I do research…I think people are bored with computer generated artwork…even my younger clients, they’d rather have it  done professionally than use stick on letters – it shows they’ve got taste.

You can find an earlier profile of Peter here and see an archive of his work on Flickr. (Thx Monique)

 

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Published October 6, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The Man With the Getaway Face — Cartoonist Darwyn Cooke talks The LA Times’ Hero Complex blog about his latest Richard Stark (AKA Donald Westlake) adaptation, The Outfit, released this month:

With the first book, I was really trying to get Don Westlake’s worldview across to people. The story had already been told several times in films… and what-have-you, but it had never been told down the line, so it was really important for me to do that. With “The Outfit,”  I was able to sort of step back and say, ‘OK, the plan is we’re doing four books here; are there ways I can make this one stronger in terms of how it relates to the three other books?’ We don’t have, say, 20 books to get our readers acquainted with this entire world, so are there things that I can do here to help in that regard? So I changed a few things. And to be honest, I fixed a couple  of tiny problems with the story that I think Donald would have giggled about if I had brought them up. ‘Oh, geez, good point…‘

And on the subject of Richard Stark, David Drummond recently posted the final 3 covers (there are 18 in total) for the University of Chicago Press’ Parker reissues  (mentioned previously here):

Where the Wind Blows — Stephen Page, CEO of Faber & Faber, outlines the challenges facing existing book publishers at The Guardian:

Publishers perform roles that writers need. The question now is whether writers will continue to turn to existing publishers to perform these tasks, and whether they believe they offer value. Some authors will bypass publishers (some always have) but among most authors and agents I deal with, there is no appetite to do so, because publishers continue to perform essential roles for writers in both the physical and digital worlds (editorial, marketing, distribution, and so on). However, urgent questions are rising about how a successful 21st-century publisher ought to look and function, and whether existing publishers can adapt quickly enough…

A Hipster Never Teaches  a Square Anything — Over at Good, Lexicographer Mark Peters looks at the origins of the word “hipster” and why, these days, nobody admits to being one:

“Hipster” first popped up in 1940, and The Historical Dictionary of American Slang’s first use includes the statement that “A hipster never teaches a square anything.” The OED’s early examples include semi-definitions such as “know-it-all” (1941) and “man who’s in the know, grasps everything, is alert” (1946). Those descriptions sound groovy, but in the HDAS’s definition of “hipster,” we can find the seed that grew into today’s widespread hipster-phobia: “A person who is or attempts to be hip, esp. a fan of swing or bebop music.” It’s that attempting—especially in clumsy, transparent ways—that make the hipster horrible.

And finally…

What Batman Taught Me About Being a Good Dad — The headline tells you just about all you need to know about Adam Rogers post for The Atlantic (what dad doesn’t secretly believes that Batman is full of very important life lessons?), but hey…

I am trying to build a good human being here, someone who will make the world better for his presence. Because I don’t know any other way to do it, that means I’m building a little geek… I want him to think that these stories have weight, that they mean something; they are our myths. I give my son comics and cartoons and episodes of Thunderbirds because I want him to understand right and wrong, and why it’s important to fight the dark side of the Force. The mantras spoken in this corner of pop culture are immature, but they have power: With great power comes great responsibility. Truth, justice, and the American Way. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. No evil shall escape my sight.

secretly
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Published May 28, 2010

Agents of Change

There’s a great op-ed by Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, in today’s Guardian about the iPad and publishing:

It’s clear that publishers must move faster to establish our compelling and useful role in the modern life of reading. While acquiring new expertise, we must assert the best of our traditional strengths; providing capital (in the form of advance payments), offering editorial expertise, and creating a readership by designing, creating, storing, promoting and selling the works of writers. But that’s not enough. Publishers also have to explain what value they are bringing to the relationship between writers and readers, a conversation that is made far more transparent through digital media and digital texts.

Page goes on to list what he sees as guiding principles for publishing going forward. These include retaining print and digital rights, reviewing royalties, flexible pricing, connecting to readers, and excellent metadata. He concludes:

The iPad launch is not the moment, but that’s because the moment has passed. We need to work with authors in new ways, and keep pace with reading’s evolution, or better still become agents of change ourselves.

It’s a must-read. If you work in publishing, send it to your CEO.

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Published November 17, 2008

Faber: Looking Back, Going Forward

Not some dusty, elbow-patched publisher: The Bookseller talks to CEO and publisher Stephen Page about Faber & Faber’s legacy and their plans for the future:

“We are in a moment of major, major change. Which from a brand like Faber is not threatening, only exciting, stimulating and interesting… The happy residue of the past 80 years is that we have this great history with six Booker winners and 11 Nobel laureates. Yet if we sit still and admire ourselves, this will only have a half-life and it will cool.”

Founded by Geoffrey Faber and T S Eliot, Faber published some of the defining books of the 20th Century including James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They celebrate their 80th anniversary next year.

Link

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