From Publishers Weekly:

Little, Brown, in conjunction with the estate of J.D. Salinger, announced plans to release e-book editions of Salinger’s four beloved works of fiction, marking the first time his books have been available in a digital format.

The release of the four books—The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction—in e-book editions (with new cover designs) marks a continuing year-long centennial celebration of Salinger’s acclaimed works of fiction.

. . . .

Reagan Arthur, senior v-p, publisher of Little, Brown. said “This centennial year is an occasion for revisiting J. D. Salinger’s books as well as for approaching them for the first time. So it’s the ideal moment to be publishing his works as e-books.

The release of the e-books will be accompanied by a special focus on libraries and will include a 1,000 e-book giveaway sweepstakes to public libraries in North America organized by OverDrive.

. . . .

Salinger, who died in 2010, rejected digital editions of his work while he was alive. Since his death, Matt Salinger, the author’s son and administrator of the Salinger estate, has continued to carry out his father’s wishes. However, Salinger said the time has come to make sure his father’s books are available to a new generation of readers.

Salinger said “There were few things my father loved more than the full tactile experience of reading a printed book, but he may have loved his readers more—and not just the ‘ideal private reader’ he wrote about, but all his readers. As it became clear to us that increasing numbers of readers today read only e-books, and after I was taken severely (if also humorously) to task by a reader with a disability in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who can’t read except on an electronic device, we decided it was time.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG is 99% certain that the publishing agreements J.D. Salinger signed would not have included ebooks and likely had a reservation of rights clause that provided that all rights not granted to the publisher were reserved to the author.

The publisher paid Salinger’s heirs a tidy sum and they signed either an updated publishing contract or an amendment to the original contracts to permit the publication of ebooks.

From Publishing Perspectives:

In her statement issued today (August 13), the Association of American Publishers‘ president and CEO Maria A. Pallante has pointed out that the book publishing industry is in no way out of the woods, as Donald Trump’s administration continues its lurching sequence of threats and feints on a proposed US$300 billion in new tariffs on goods imported from China.

“We remain deeply concerned,” Pallante says in her statement, “that a wide range of other books remain on the list, including American fiction and nonfiction books; art books; textbooks; dictionaries and encyclopedias; and technical, scientific and professional books.”

Moving to delay the levy of tariffs on certain classifications of goods until December 15—ostensibly to avoid damaging the American holiday season revenue for many industries—the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) offices in Washington have included (as described on the agency’s listings):

• 4903.00.40 Children’s picture, drawing, or coloring books
• 4910.00.20  Calendars printed on paper or paperboard in whole or in part by a lithographic process, not over 0.51 mm in thickness

And Bibles—which perhaps with some irony are said to be printable almost exclusively by Chinese presses—are off the tariff lists.

But, as Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly sums up the remainder, about which Pallante is expressing the association’s concern, “All other [than children’s] books printed in China, including trade, education, and professional titles, are still subject to 10-percent tariffs beginning September 1.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG did a quick and dirty online search to see if he could find the locations of Amazon’s print on demand presses. He found an item that said European POD Amazon books were printed in Europe, but found nothing about KDP hardcopy printing locations elsewhere.

From The Atlantic:

Have you read Victoria Helen Stone’s False Step? No? Surprising, given that it’s a best seller, and that you clicked on an article about books and publishing—I thought you were more widely read. Surely you’ve at least gotten through Loreth Anne White’s The Dark Bones? Julianne MacLean’s A Fire Sparkling? Claire McGowan’s What You Did?

No? Each of these books beat out Where the Crawdads Sing, then the No. 1 New York Times best-selling novel, on the Kindle Store best-seller chart in recent months. Each one is a bright star in the self-contained, lucrative universe of ebooks. And each one was published by Amazon Publishing, a subsidiary of the store we already buy everything else from.

Founded in 2009, Amazon Publishing is far from the tech giant’s best-known enterprise, but it is a quietly consequential piece of the company’s larger strategy to become a one-stop shop for all your consumer decisions. As Amazon Studios does with movies, Amazon Publishing feeds the content pipelines created by the tech giant’s online storefront and Amazon Prime membership program. At its most extreme, Amazon Publishing is a triumph of vertical engineering: If a reader buys one of its titles on a Kindle, Amazon receives a cut both as publisher and as bookseller—not to mention whatever markup it made on the device in the first place, as well as the amortized value of having created more content to draw people into its various book-subscription offerings. (One literary agent summed it up succinctly to The Wall Street Journal in January: “They aren’t gaming the system. They own the system.”)

. . . .

And Amazon Publishing is a culture-making juggernaut, even if the literati don’t much think about it. According to Peter Hildick-Smith, the CEO of the book-industry analysis firm the Codex Group, roughly 25.5 million U.S. households bought books in the past month, and fully a quarter of those households use Prime Reading, a feature of Amazon Prime that allows subscribers to borrow 10 items at a time from a catalog of 1,000 ebooks, magazines, and other media, including the tech giant’s originals.

Prime Reading is far from Amazon’s only reading subscription service. Kindle Unlimited, a similar program, costs an extra $9.99 and offers a wider selection of 1 million titles. The Prime Book Box for children includes a selection of age-appropriate books delivered regularly for $19.99. Amazon First Reads allows members to download a book a month earlier than the unsubscribed public for no extra cost. Often, First Reads are—you guessed it—Amazon Publishing titles, and they rocket up the Kindle best-seller charts as soon as they’re made available; A Fire Sparkling and What You Did both topped the charts in early July despite being due out August 1.

. . . .

Amazon Publishing is still a relatively small fry: According to Hildick-Smith, it puts out 1,100 titles a year, compared with the 1,500 to 2,000 a large publishing house such as Simon & Schuster might publish. Estimating sales for those 1,100 titles is difficult, according to experts, because the tech giant doesn’t disclose ebook sales numbers for its original books, and its proprietary methods of distribution obscure those figures from the third-party researchers who determine best-seller lists.Grace Doyle, the editor who oversees the Amazon Publishing mystery/thriller imprint, Thomas & Mercer, and the science fiction/fantasy label, 47North, says the subsidiary looks at three things when measuring the success of a title: the book’s sales, the number of people who actually read it (Amazon maintains a “most read” chart, measured by ebook pages turned), and whether the company can expect more books to come from its relationship with the author. She said again and again in our interview that her goal was to maintain partnerships with authors for as long as possible, which often results in publishing series, especially for the thrillers and mysteries that do so well with ebook readers.

Indeed, Amazon Publishing knows its readers and has pursued their appetites since its inception. Jeff Belle, the vice president of Amazon Publishing, acknowledged their tastes in a 2011 interview: “Our customers are voracious readers of genre fiction.”. . . .Many authors seem to love Amazon Publishing. Robert Dugoni, who has written 10 mystery and thriller novels for Amazon, inked a deal with the company in 2013, after becoming dissatisfied with the amount of advertising his previous publisher, Simon & Schuster, put behind his books. Amazon Publishing, he says, still promotes the opener of his ongoing mystery/thriller series, My Sister’s Grave, a six-year-old book, in Kindle Store promotions; Dugoni says he’s sold 1.5 million copies of that title and 5 million copies of all his books with Amazon Publishing since 2013. The “hunger” of Amazon Publishing’s employees, along with its reams of customer data and speedy editing process, impressed him, he says, to the point that he recently appeared in one of its marketing videos.

“They’re constantly reinventing marketing and promotion to keep my name and my books in front of readers,” Dugoni told me. “From an author’s perspective, that’s all I ever wanted: people to read my books.” Doyle called Amazon’s success with Dugoni—a reinvigoration of an established author who wasn’t selling well elsewhere—“emblematic of our goals.” In January, Mark Sullivan, an author who writes historical fiction and mysteries, relayed a similar story of a career revived by Amazon Publishing.

. . . .

Prime subscribers are so valuable to Amazon because they spend more in the long run: Jeff Bezos has said that people who stream videos on Amazon convert from free trials and renew their Prime subscriptions at higher rates than those who don’t. He put it bluntly in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.”

Book readers are the same. Content is the hook; commerce is the goal. If users join Prime for early access to a new title by their favorite author, rather than buying a one-off copy of the book, they become much more likely to purchase other things on Amazon—couches, clothes, cutlery, etc.—to take advantage of the membership. Bezos said in 2015, “It’s how our whole model works. When someone joins Prime, the more they buy of everything we sell.” That is to say, when the Amazon Publishing original You Are (Not) Small won the 2015 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award, one of the most prestigious for children’s books, diaper sales presumably skyrocketed. (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on sales spikes correlated with awards.)

Link to the rest at The Atlantic and thanks to DM for the tip.

Although to the best of PG’s knowledge, Amazon hasn’t released any sort of detailed demographic data about its Prime members, PG would bet most members of this group comprise the principal target market for a large number of retailers.

Money to spend, convenience-oriented, well-educated, big digital fans are likely among the principal descriptors of Amazon Prime subscribers. A great many retailers, service providers and others would love, love, love to reach this demographic efficiently.

Again, PG is not aware of any publicly-available customer satisfaction data for Prime members, but he would also bet that it’s sky-high. This group likes to buy a lot of different things from Amazon because Amazon makes it easy for them to discover, select and receive the goods (and, increasingly, he predicts, more of the services) these customers want.

Obviously, PG would love to see a lot of proprietary information Amazon has, but one of the items he most covets is what a typical Prime member and a typical non-Prime Amazon shopper spend on Amazon in the 3-5 years after their first Amazon purchase.

See Amazon Prime: 20 benefits every member gets and 31 Best Amazon Prime Benefits to Use in 2019 for more of the reasons why a lot of people love Amazon Prime.

From The American Library Association:

On July 25, Macmillan Publishers announced a new library ebook lending model. In response, the American Library Association’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office released the following statement:

The American Library Association (ALA) denounces the new library ebook lending model announced today by Macmillan Publishers. Under the new model, a library may purchase one copy upon release of a new title in ebook format, after which the publisher will impose an eight-week embargo on additional copies of that title sold to libraries.

“Macmillan Publishers’ new model for library ebook lending will make it difficult for libraries to fulfill our central mission: ensuring access to information for all,” said ALA President Wanda Kay Brown. “Limiting access to new titles for libraries means limiting access for patrons most dependent on libraries.

“When a library serving many thousands has only a single copy of a new title in ebook format, it’s the library—not the publisher—that feels the heat. It’s the local library that’s perceived as being unresponsive to community needs.

“Macmillan’s new policy is unacceptable,” said Brown. “ALA urges Macmillan to cancel the embargo.”

The new Macmillan ebook lending model is an expansion of an existing policy that went into effect in July 2018, when the company, without warning, issued a four-month embargo applying solely to titles from the company’s Tor imprint. At the time, ALA stated that the delay would hurt readers, authors, and libraries.

Since last fall, Hachette Book Group and Penguin Random House have eliminated “perpetual access” for libraries and replaced it with a two-year access model. Simon & Schuster changed from a one-year to two-year access model. While reevaluating their business models, none of these firms implemented an embargo—deciding that equitable access to information through libraries is also in their business interest. HarperCollins continues with its 26-loan model. Macmillan now stands alone in its embargo policy among the largest Big Five publishers.

Macmillan will decrease its price to $30 for the single initial copy of an ebook. Unlike other Big Five publishers, this copy of Macmillan titles come with perpetual access. After the embargo period, additional copies will be available for $60 per copy for two years of access.

“This new embargo is the latest evidence of a troubling trend in the publishing industry,” said Brown. “ALA is developing a strategy to address this trend in the long term. Following the model of ALA’s former Digital Content Working Group, this advocacy effort will extend several years, not several months, and will not be limited to one company in the publishing ecosystem. ALA will push harder and explore all possible avenues to ensure that libraries can do our jobs of providing access to information for all, without arbitrary limitations that undermine libraries’ abilities to serve their communities.

“In the short term, ALA calls on library customers of Macmillan Publishers to tell CEO John Sargent they object to the publishing company’s new policy.”

Link to the rest at The American Library Association

In the US and, perhaps, elsewhere, the community public library stands with mom, apple pie and the flag as a loved and respected institution, especially in smaller communities.

The library often sponsors a children’s story hour during which a librarian will read a children’s book to any children who wish to attend. While the children are listening, the parents are chatting in the background, usually talking about their children and challenges, community happenings, etc.

The library will also often have a space for small meetings that is available at no charge in the evenings so community groups can gather to further their various purposes.

For lower-income patrons, the library may offer the only high-speed internet access available. Libraries also often host adult-learning classes, both online and in person.

Suffice to say, in a public relations battle between Big Publishing and community libraries, the libraries will win hands-down.

PG’s only criticism of the OP is that it didn’t include an email address where complaints could be sent to Macmillan and a hashtag for social media use.

From Publishers Weekly:

More than a year after imposing a controversial four month “test” embargo on new release e-books in libraries from it’s Tor imprint, Macmillan announced today that it will now impose a two month embargo on library e-books across all of the company’s imprints. The terms take effect November 1.

Under the publisher’s new digital terms of sale for libraries, “library systems” will be now be allowed to purchase a single—that is, one—perpetual access e-book during the first eight weeks of publication for each new Macmillan release, at half price ($30). Additional copies will then be available at full price (generally $60 for new releases) after the eight-week window has passed. All other terms remain the same: e-book licenses will continue to be metered for two years or 52 lends, whichever comes first, on a one copy/one user model. A Macmillan spokesperson confirmed to PWthat the single perpetual access copy will be available only for new release titles in the first eight weeks after publication—the option to buy a single perpetual access copy expires after that eight week window, and the offer is not available for backlist titles.

In what counts as a measure of good news for libraries, however, no changes were announced for Macmillan digital audiobooks.

Macmillan is now the fourth Big Five publisher to change its terms for digital content in libraries in recent months—but its changes, and the views expressed by Macmillan CEO John Sargent, are by far the most unique and contentious of the group. In a July 25 memo (addressed to authors, illustrators, and agents), Sargent not only delivered the news of Macmillan’s library e-book changes, he basically called out libraries for depressing author payments.

“It seems that given a choice between a purchase of an e-book for $12.99 or a frictionless lend for free, the American e-book reader is starting to lean heavily toward free,” Sargent wrote. “Our new terms are designed to protect the value of your books during their first format publication. But they also ensure that the mission of libraries is supported.”

In the memo, Sargent asserted that 45% of Macmillan’s U.S. “e-book reads” were now “being borrowed for free” from libraries,” a trend he attributed to a mix of factors, including the lack of “friction” in e-lending compared to physical book lending, the “active marketing by various parties to turn purchasers into borrowers,” and unnamed apps “supporting e-book lending regardless of residence, including borrowing from libraries in different states and countries.”

. . . .

Alan Inouye, ALA’s senior director, for Public Policy & Government Relations, offered a blunt first assessment of Macmillan’s plan: “Worse than expected,” he told PW. “Embargoes violate the principle of equitable access to information that is at the core of libraries,” he added, pointing out that Macmillan’s policy is curiously out of step with the rest of the industry. “Within the past year, three of the other Big Five publishers revised their library e-book business models, and none of them concluded that libraries were a threat to their profitability,” Inouye observed. “Indeed, these other publishers believe that libraries benefit their businesses. Macmillan stands alone with its embargo.”

. . . .

“This is just Sargent using fear tactics, trying to gaslight authors and agents,” said PW library columnist Brian Kenney, director of the White Plains Public Library, citing Sargent’s references to “mysterious” data that “is never shared” and suggestions that libraries are somehow circulating e-books outside their service areas. “My library is able to share its e-book collection with other libraries in my consortium, but with the consent of all the publishers involved. And it rarely involves sharing frontlist titles, since an algorithm ensures that my e-book copies go to fulfill requests from my users first. And for every four requests, we purchase another copy.” As for an app that would allow libraries to circulate e-books to patrons outside of their service area, Kenney says he is unaware of any.

. . . .

Susan Caron, director, Collections & Membership Services, for the Toronto Public Library, which racked up the most digital lends in 2018, according to vendor OverDrive, said the claims in Sargent’s memo left her speechless. “I don’t know where to start,” Caron said. “Active marketing to turn purchasers into borrowers? There is no friction in e-lending? Except that people have to wait months for a title. I just randomly picked Normal People by Sally Rooney, published in August 2018. One year later, people still have to wait 29 weeks for a copy and we have 130. Hardly frictionless.”

And both Kenney and Caron suggest Macmillan clearly did not listen to librarian input, because the single perpetual access copy is not useful. “If we need more than one copy of a title, we’ll just wait. [Otherwise] our users will be upset if we don’t buy more to reduce holds, as we normally do. And if we can wait eight weeks, we may decide not to buy the title at all.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG suggests that this is a ham-handed, short-sighted action by Macmillan and other members of the Big Publishing Groupthink Boys Band.

But it’s what PG has come to expect from a declining, antediluvian industry that is out of original ideas.

PG remembers when publishers believed that exposure of their books and authors among library patrons helped to spur additional sales. Avid readers who use the library frequently are often regarded as excellent sources for information on great new books for their friends. Many a book club selection was first discovered as a book borrowed from a library.

This move also strikes PG as an attempt to manipulate the masses by executives who are far-removed from the masses and lack any real comprehension about how the proletariate will react to efforts to manipulate more money out of their pockets.

Here are some unintended consequences that PG suspects may result from this strategy:

• Those who are inclined to remove copy protection from ebooks will feel more justified if ebooks are expensive and not readily available through libraries.
• If an ebook is unavailable at the library due to the publisher’s strategy, librarians will be more inclined to recommend other books that are available. By the time the publisher’s embargo finally expires, more than a few readers will have forgotten their interest in a book/author because the effects of launch publicity will have faded.
• More readers will turn to KDP and Kindle Publishing books and discover a lot of excellent ebooks at much more reasonable prices or at no cost through Kindle Unlimited and/or Prime Reading or simply among indie authors on Amazon.

From Wikipedia:

The [Titanic’s] eight musicians – members of a three-piece ensemble and a five-piece ensemble – were booked through C.W. & F.N. Black, in Liverpool.They boarded at Southampton and traveled as second-class passengers. They were not on the White Star Line’s payroll but were contracted to White Star by the Liverpool firm of C.W. & F.N. Black, who placed musicians on almost all British liners. Until the night of the sinking, the players performed as two separate groups: a quintet led by violinist and official bandleader Wallace Hartley, that played at teatime, after-dinner concerts, and Sunday services, among other occasions; and the violin, cello, and piano trio of Georges Krins, Roger Bricoux, and Theodore Brailey, that played at the À La Carte Restaurant and the Café Parisien.

After the Titanic hit an iceberg and began to sink, Hartley and his fellow band members started playing music to help keep the passengers calm as the crew loaded the lifeboats. Many of the survivors said that Hartley and the band continued to play until the very end.

Link to the rest at Wikipedia

From The Bookseller:

Will we see this week as the moment when everything changed, a peek through the looking glass into a new era? I speak not of the sometime author and Conservative MP Boris Johnson becoming the UK’s Prime Minister, but the release of Amazon’s new weekly charts showing, for the first time, the impact of the huge but opaque digital sector on book sales.

There are plenty of known knowns from the first week’s release. Rachel Abbott, the author behind the biggest-selling fiction title of the week, And So it Begins, has long been a digital hit-maker. Her début thriller, Only the Innocent, was self-published in 2011, with Amazon revealing in 2015 that she was its bestselling “indie” author in the five years since Kindle launched. Like many of these authors, however, she has been largely absent from Nielsen BookScan’s bestseller universe, her top-seller having shifted just 6,955 copies in print. The chart also highlights the success of new digitally-led publishers such as Joffe Books and the more familiar Bookouture, which feature along with Amazon imprints Lake Union Publishing and Thomas & Mercer.

There is also the impact of audio, particularly in the most read/listens chart, where Audible’s release of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection, read by Stephen Fry, sits in 10th, below the seven Harry Potter titles, their popularity also augmented by the Fry-narrated audio editions. That so many readers are listening to backlist audio shows the potential of the market, but also that it may need a different approach.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

From Publishing Perspectives:

Keen observers of the trade publishing scene this week may have noticed in the news Publishing Perspectivesreported on Monday about longtime bestseller Dean Koontz taking a new five-book series and short story collection to Amazon Publishing.

For decades, the prolific Koontz made his publishing home primarily at Penguin Random House’s Bantam, racking up more than 45 titles with the Big Five imprint, only to be discovered now talking of being “creatively rejuvenated” to have found a publisher “where change is understood and embraced” and “a marketing and publicity plan smarter and more ambitious than anything I’d ever seen before.”

And yet, years ago, many in publishing, including veteran observer Mike Shatzkin, were watching for “defections” from major houses—not to Amazon Publishing but to the self-publishing platform Kindle Direct Publishing. The idea was that an established and well-heeled author could easily hire the “author services,” as they’re called, to do the grunt work of preparing a manuscript for self-publishing and managing its life in the online sales maelstrom, while using print-on-demand to produce brick-and-mortar store copies for physical book fans.

Instead, Koontz may be the canary in the trade industry mines who hops off that darkening perch and buzzes out into the sunlight of Internet sales leadership—where the Association of American Publishers’ annual StatShot tells us, more book sales now are happening than on physical retail channels.

On Tuesday, Shatzkin wrote in a well-timed addendum to a column on publishing’s past decade, “If this is a sign of things to come, and it is hard to see why it wouldn’t be, some profound changes might be just around the corner.”

As Shatzkin tells it, “Between the time this post was started and when it was finished and published, another sign of disruption took place. Amazon Publishing signed the bestselling author Dean Koontz to a multi-book contract. At the beginning of this decade, Amazon Publishing had ideas about signing up big authors. But they were stymied then by the pretty stubborn refusal of the rest of the supply chain to stock books published by their biggest retail competitor.”

. . . .

“Whether they will successfully sell Koontz … remains to be seen,” Shatzkin writes. “But,” he goes on—italics ours—”their no-middle-person structure enables them to pay far more of each retail dollar in royalties.

“Half the sales or more can generate more income to the author than a publisher without its own retailing capability can deliver selling a larger number of units.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

I am returning this September to speak at Digital Book World.

. . . .

The new DBW is well aware of “corporate” publishing, a term they use to describe the increasingly frequent occurrence of non-publishing companies and entities issuing their own books (and not necessarily with the primary objective being to make money doing so).

This inspired me to make a list of Big Changes since 2009. It did not take long to come up with quite a few.

The arrival of the IPad and ubiquitous smartphones and tablets
Pretty universal broadband
Apple iBookstore
Nook: big arrival on the market, large uptake, fairly rapid sunset
Successful, as in producing dollars and reaching readers, self-publishing
Disappearance of Borders
“Resurgence” of independents (and its limits)
Diminishing of B&N
Growth of Amazon from less than a fifth of sales for most publishers to over half
Through Ingram, a full POD and distribution infrastructure available to anybody
Audio has become ubiquitous (fastest-growing segment; smartphones; Audible)

. . . .

Ten years ago: Pub date was the key organizing point for the assignment of a publisher’s budgeted and conscious efforts on a book. Generally, publishers marketed six months around pub date.
Today: Any book can pop at any time. This has had a very visible impact on budgeting and marketing resource allocation, but it also adds a new challenge: monitoring the world to make the best decisions about what books to put effort into right now.

TYA: “Direct marketing” to consumers was the work of specialists.
TOD: Every publisher builds and maintains email lists, with widely varying degrees of expertise applied to using them.

. . . .

TYA: Popular reference books were enduring backlist for book publishers. I know, because in the 1980s I created a compendium of baseball biographies called “The Ballplayers”, trying to appeal to the same audience of the perennial bestseller, Macmillan’s “Baseball Encyclopedia”.
TOD: You wouldn’t think of going to a book for either of these things. “The Ballplayers” had a life online as BaseballLibrary.com before Wikipedia mooted it. And the encyclopedia was effectively replaced long ago by baseballreference.com.

. . . .

TYA: In order for a book to sell, it really needed to be distributed by a “legitimate” publisher, because it was a requirement to be on sale in bookstores to move the needle and only a publisher could get books stocked across a wide range of outlets.
TOD: There are big categories of books (mostly genre fiction) that have a vast number of crowd-curated self-published titles that are available at prices no commercial enterprise can consistently match. And anybody with a worthy title can buy their way into full distribution without having to persuade a publisher to give them a contract.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files