Earlier this week, digital publishing evangelist Jennifer 8. Lee had an opinion piece published in The Seattle Times. The article appeared just prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair, an event where small, medium, and big-league international publishing insiders buy, sell, or trade assets as well as gain (hopefully) useful information. Lee's piece doesn't say anything new or illuminating about the publishing biz. However, the article's appearance, and what it does not say, are curious. Let me elaborate.
Seattle is home base for Amazon, far and away the most disruptive force in publishing's often insular world. What goes uncited in Lee's piece is her enterprise's connection to Amazon, even though the Seattle-based firm is mentioned twice in the story.
Lee co-founded and runs a self-defined "literary studio" called Plympton. Its vision, according to Plympton's website, is to reinvent "how people experience literature by combining serialized fiction and digital platforms." A little over a month ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos launched a line of serialized fiction books that would appear on -- drumroll, please -- Kindle gadgets. Three of the ten titles were from Plympton's stable of assets. Supposedly, according to a Boston Globe story, Plympton and Amazon inked the deal 24 hours before Bezos announced it before a very high-profile audience in Santa Monica. Some have strongly doubted the public version of this story, specifically noting that Amazon's profound lust for secrecy and control would have ruled out any initiative that hadn't been thoroughly calculated for intention and impact.
Lee's Seattle Times opinion piece doesn't mention the Amazon-Plympton dots, never mind bother to connect them. This disingenuous stance, from a former New York Times technology writer, makes me wary of the writer's intention. Just what was the point of this piece? Who was its target? (C'mon, you know in your heart it wasn't the subscribers of The Seattle Times.) According to the thumbnail bio at the end of the piece, she "splits her time between Boston, San Francisco and New York." Hmmm.....no second home in The Emerald City.
There are many unanswered questions in the publishing world. These are just a few of them.
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