The Hunger Games franchise, with Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role, aims for a spot in a select but very sweet pantheon: movie adaptations of bestselling children’s book series that have become box office juggernauts. The Harry Potter movies set the pattern, and the Twilight films proved that it could be replicated. So far, the Hunger Games’ chances look good; according to a poll conducted by MTV’s Nextmovie.com, the film version of Collins’ dystopian young adult novel is even more eagerly anticipated than “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2.”

Being made into a movie can do a lot for a book. But consider the boost a book this popular can give to the movie. The Harry Potter and Twilight series delivered up obsessively devoted audiences who speculated about casting for years before the films were released, who debated and pored over every still, poster, teaser, trailer — in short, every shred of news about the forthcoming cinematic realization of their favorite characters and stories. They loved those books as only kids can, with an intensity that makes for sprawling fan sites and mobbed midnight release parties at your ordinarily sleepy neighborhood bookstore.

The Hunger Games is that kind of series, if for a more serious-minded, science-fiction-loving breed of teen. And then there are the adult fans. The actress Kristen Bell (star of the cult-TV series “Veronica Mars”) recently told the Huffington Post that “The Hunger Games” is “all I think about.” Bell threw an elaborate Hunger Games-themed party for her 30th birthday: “All my friends dressed as the characters and I dressed as Katniss [Everdeen, the books' heroine].”

As of this writing, the first book in the Hunger Games series has been parked on the USA Today bestseller list for 132 weeks; the second, “Catching Fire,” for 131. There are more than 24 million copies of all three books in print. Unlike the Harry Potter series, which was aimed (originally) at middle-grade readers, this is a young-adult epic with a particularly dark premise: In a future version of America called Panem, 12 districts subjugated by a central authority must each send a pair of their children to compete in a gladiatorial contest from which only one will emerge alive. In marked contrast to the swoony vampire romance of the Twilight series, the many harrowing action sequences in “The Hunger Games” make the books equally appealing to boys and girls.

It’s indicative of the balkanization of the reading world that if you don’t have teenage children, you may not have heard of “The Hunger Games” until quite recently, despite the fact that for several years the book’s success has rivaled that of “The Help” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Although both Harry Potter and Twilight have demonstrated that there’s a sizable adult readership for some children’s books, the genre is still (mostly) reviewed in separate publications, shelved in its own section of the library and often sold in separate stores. In fact, children’s book publishing operates quite differently from its adult counterpart. And in many respects, that’s a good thing.

With the right title, a kid’s publisher can deploy something the world of adult publishing can only dream about: a large, well-oiled and highly networked group of professional and semi-professional taste makers who can make that book a hit even before it’s published. This is what happened with “The Hunger Games,” which landed on the New York Times Bestseller List — there are separate ones for kids’ books — the week it was released. In the post-Harry Potter and Twilight world, breakout children’s series like “The Hunger Games” automatically attract the interest of big-budget Hollywood film producers. That means that the mostly invisible legion of experts who hiked “The Hunger Games” onto the bestseller list will be determining some of the blockbusters you’ll see in your local multiplex a couple of years down the road.

Cue the obligatory bad-mouthing of publishing and its antiquated ways. But before you get into that, it’s essential to grasp the central, maddening paradox that confronts all book marketers, from venerable New York publishing houses to tiny independent presses: The only thing that reliably sells books is word of mouth, preferably a personal recommendation from a trusted friend. The one successful mass-market book-promoting phenomenon of our time, the Oprah Book Club, was just that — an endorsement from someone with the very rare gift of convincing millions of people that they know her really well.

Advertising and reviews and flogging on Facebook or Twitter don’t help much unless the author already has a large following. A book demands more time and energy from its consumers than a movie or a song, and readers increasingly require a chorus of endorsements before they’re willing to try something new. (Think about it: We all have friends who occasionally steer us wrong, but if several of them are raving about the same book, it looks like a much safer bet.) When you can’t persuade someone to read your book until somebody else has read and endorsed it, you’re in limbo — like the proverbial job-seeker who can’t get hired without experience and can’t get experience without a job.

Many of the most arcane practices of the publishing industry are methods for working around this dilemma. It begins even before a book goes to press. Those unfamiliar with publishing’s peculiar customs may wonder at the mystique surrounding “in-house enthusiasm,” a key factor in the success of any book, whether it’s for adults or for children. In an ideal world, publishers would be enthusiastic about every single book they publish, right? But all too often the manuscript doesn’t fulfill the promise of the proposal, or the novel that one editor adores leaves everyone else cold. The ability of a book to generate interest in random staff members is a publisher’s first sign that it has legs. This is the beginning of the long and elaborate winnowing process that separates the also-rans from the hits, much of which happens even before store clerks take the books out of the carton.

“The Hunger Games” started out with an advantage. Scholastic Books, Collins’ publisher, had done well with Collins’ previous series, the Underland Chronicles, five books for middle-grade (8-to-12-year-old) readers about a boy who discovers a gritty fantasy world under the streets of New York. With that in mind, Scholastic bought “The Hunger Games” on the strength of a four-page proposal covering all three books of the projected YA (young adult) trilogy. In the summer of 2007, Collins submitted a draft of the first book to three editors, including Scholastic’s executive editorial director, David Levithan, and Kate Egan, a freelancer who has worked on all of Collins’ books.

Levithan and Egan were among the first readers to be sucked into the irresistible tractor-beam of Collins’ narrative. The book begins with the 74th annual Hunger Games lottery in the hardscrabble mining region of District 12. The heroine, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, is skilled with bow and arrow; her family survives on her poaching. In the lottery, Katniss’ beloved little sister is selected as a tribute (a death sentence for someone so young), and Katniss volunteers to go to the games in her stead. She’s whisked away to the decadent Capitol, where she undergoes training — and a rather fabulous makeover — alongside her fellow District 12 tribute, Peeta, the baker’s son. All of this builds up to the Games themselves, conducted in a fenced-off wilderness preserve in which the tributes battle for food, supplies and weapons while invisible cameras broadcast their every move.

“The Hunger Games” is a novel that takes to heart Billy Wilder’s famous dictum for screenwriters: “Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.” Before she turned to books, Collins, who has a background in theater, wrote children’s television shows for Nickelodeon. “I think that writing for episodic television, knowing that you have to have that rising and falling tension, and end that episode at a particular place, has served her very well,” said her agent, Rosemary Stimola. Karen Springen, a former Newsweek reporter and one of the first journalists to extoll “The Hunger Games,” puts it this way: “She knew how to do cliffhangers to get you to come back after the commercial break. Each chapter is a cliffhanger, and each book is a cliffhanger.”

Scholastic employees began eagerly passing the manuscript around the office. It was the first stirring of what would become a tidal wave of word of mouth. “When you have the kind of book,” said Rachel Coun, executive director of marketing, “where assistants from other departments, even though it’s not their job, come asking for the galleys because they’ve heard it’s really great, you know you have something.” “We made a lot of copies,” said Levithan. “Coming out of the fall sales conference, everyone knew that the best way to generate excitement about ‘The Hunger Games’ was to get people to read ‘The Hunger Games.’” That isn’t as easy as it sounds; over 20,000 new children’s books are published annually, and the people Scholastic needed to reach — people outside the company — are drowning in the piles of books arriving from hopeful publishers.

In January, the book’s marketing team decided to send out photocopies of the manuscript instead of the nicely bound proofs that are typically submitted to industry professionals before the finished version of a book comes off the presses. “We didn’t want to wait until we had advance readers copies,” said Levithan. “We wanted key booksellers and key librarians to read it as soon as possible.” Just as significant as the timing, a choice like this is part of an informal semaphore system between publishers and the all-important first readers of any new children’s book. A Xeroxed, plastic-comb-bound manuscript conveys both urgency and the conviction that here’s a title that doesn’t need attractive packaging to make an impression. “It signals that this is something they think is special,” said Andrew Medlar, youth materials specialist for the Chicago Public Library. “It’s not something we do very often,” Levithan concurred.

Scholastic sales reps were given a limited number of manuscripts to distribute to their list of “Big Mouths,” children’s publishing lingo for booksellers who have exceptional influence with co-workers and peers. These people run regional associations, organize book fairs and set up school events. Teachers and librarians come to them for hot tips on new kids’ titles.

Carol Chittenden, a classic Big Mouth, is a co-owner of Eight Cousins bookstore in Falmouth, Mass. and founded the New England Children’s Booksellers Advisory Council, which (among other things) maintains a website where members can swap opinions on forthcoming titles. Her cozy children’s bookstore in a small Cape Cod town may seem a long way from Hollywood, but people like Chittenden — who’s been selling kids’ books for 22 years and who instantly recognized “The Hunger Games” as “major” — are the wellsprings of word of mouth, a sort of viral ground zero where phenomena like Hunger Games fandom are born. These people are, after all, the ones who made Harry Potter a household name.

We now come to a precarious crossroads in the fate of any book, that moment when it passes out of the hands of the publisher, who has a vested interest in its success, and under the scrutiny of much tougher judges. Getting Big Mouths like Medlar and Chittenden to read the book in the first place is half the battle. Sales representatives like Nikki Mutch, who gave Chittenden her copy of the manuscript for “The Hunger Games,” are a key conduit between publisher and bookseller, the crucial node where, if all goes well, in-house enthusiasm translates into real-world buzz. The title “sales rep,” with its Willy-Lomanesque connotations of briefcase-toting drudgery, doesn’t convey the persuasive mojo these men and women can wield; their credibility, if they use it wisely, can be immense. “We totally trust her,” said Heather Hebert, manager of Children’s Book World, in Haverford, Pa., of her Scholastic sales rep. “She definitely was the reason why we all read ["The Hunger Games"] immediately. When she says it’s good, it’s good.”

If the excitement back in headquarters manages to get transmitted to the publisher’s sales reps in the field, and the reps in turn transmit it to booksellers, and if the marketing department persuades major children’s librarians to give the book a tumble, then it’s off to a good start. But a book can still stall out if that first line of expert readers isn’t impressed. “The Hunger Games,” however, proceeded to wow the Big Mouths. Rachel Coun and Scholastic’s head of publicity, Tracy van Straaten, began compiling testimonials from booksellers and librarians, many of whom mock-complained of being kept up all night, compulsively reading the manuscript; then they incorporated the quotes into their marketing campaign, reminding the wider network that leaders in their field were loving the book.

That spring, a full six months before “The Hunger Games” was set to publish, the official advance reader’s copies were among some of the most sought-after items at the conferences and conventions where publishers present their titles to booksellers and librarians. In early summer, Publishers Weekly, the industry’s trade publication, ran a story on how Scholastic had twice doubled the book’s print run in response to “early raves, particularly online, where commentary has lit up blogs and listservs.” The book was well on its way to bestseller status even before the cover art — a major conundrum for Scholastic — had been finalized.

To anyone accustomed to the often haphazard methods of adult book marketing, the apparatus marshaled on behalf of kids’ books before and after publication is both awe-inspiring and enviable. This is old-school social networking — conferences, presentations, in-store events, face-to-face recommendations to customers and colleagues (referred to as “hand selling” in the book trade) — rendered even more powerful by new technology. Every children’s bookseller and librarian I contacted for this article belongs to at least one listserv where they constantly evaluate new books with their peers. Months before “The Hunger Games” was published, Kathleen Horning, who works at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in Madison, Wis., a resource center for librarians, created a forum for the book on GoodReads, a social networking site for book lovers with over 6 million members, so she could chat about it with anyone who’d also gotten their hands on an advance reader’s copy. It was up and thriving by the time the book was published

Most booksellers and librarians want to foster reading, but none are more evangelical than the ones who specialize in kids’ books. Adult books may boast the more prominent bestseller lists and reviews, but there are entire industries and professions — with outposts in every town in America — that have made it their mission to get children to read more books. There are no institutions with the equivalent reach and dedication when it comes to promoting adult reading.

A school librarian like Alli Decker, head librarian at St. Mark’s School in San Rafael,Calif., may not have Oprah’s reach, but she’s got a lot more depth when it comes to putting a book in the hands of one of her students. “In the best-case scenario,” she explained, “I know them from first grade, when they start to read independently, on up. I know who I can challenge and who I can’t. I know who is willing to try something new and who isn’t.” “That’s what [children's] librarians basically want to do,” said Horning: “find books that kids really, really want to read.”

To that end, librarians have perfected the art of the “booktalk,” a term that, in recent years, has morphed into a transitive verb: Horning describes “The Hunger Games” as “a really fun book to booktalk.” A booktalk is a pitch, several minutes long, delivered to fellow librarians, teachers, parents and young library patrons. Librarians are invited to speak at schools and bookstores, or they travel to branches to help fill in the gaps for overworked local librarians. They are, in effect, unofficial traveling salespersons for the books they love, supported by the apparatus of respected, publicly funded institutions. Parents and teachers who are too busy to keep up with new children’s books themselves treat their advice as gospel. Andrew Medlar of the Chicago Public Library not only orders books for 79 branches and booktalks his favorite titles to his staff, he compiles lists of recommendations that are posted to the library’s website and distributed in schools, bookstores and libraries. He also nominates for important prizes.

Its high-concept premise made “The Hunger Games” an ideal candidate for booktalks. “It’s one of the easiest books to interest a child in reading,” Horning explained. Of course, librarians and teachers don’t always love the same books that kids do. Over the years, they’ve tried to steer their patrons away from what has been viewed as low-quality, if popular, series fiction: the Hardy Boys detective stories, the horror series Goosebumps, and glitzy tales of teenage hedonism like the Gossip Girls books.

“The Hunger Games,” by contrast, hits what Chittenden calls “the sweet spot of the market.” The romantic triangle of Katniss, Peeta and Gale (the boy Katniss left behind in District 12), combined with the combat and adventure of the Games themselves, appeals to a wide spectrum of teen and tween readers. Parents, teachers and librarians seize on the social and political commentary in the novel’s depiction of an authoritarian government, an exploited underclass and reality-TV voyeurism pushed to grotesque extremes.

“There were so many ways that high school teachers could use this in their curriculum that we felt that it was important for them to know about it,” said Heather Hebert of Children’s Book World in Haverford, Pa. A classroom assignment will result in multiple sales, which is why many booksellers make a point of sharing advance reader’s copies of promising books with local educators. “We’ll get a few extra ARCs and give them to the teachers,” says Betsy Wilkins of Anderson’s Bookshop, which has two stores in Illinois. “They’ll start reading that book out loud in class to the kids, just to tease them with the first few chapters.” Then, “we send out a pre-sale form so all the kids can buy it.” It’s a strategy that’s worked like a charm for many a drug dealer.

One high school teacher Wilkins works with likes to enlist the whole school in staging elaborate book-inspired events. Within weeks of the publication of “The Hunger Games,” Collins made a personal appearance at the school. She was honored with a veritable pageant. Students marched before the author costumed as the district tributes, the language arts class made posters with quotes from the novel (to illustrate such rhetorical devices as irony) and the art class re-created one of the settings in the Arena. Even the business class participated by budgeting, raising money for and finally commissioning a pendant of Katniss’ emblem, a bird called a mockingjay, to present to Collins at the event.

It’s hard to imagine the first book in any adult series being greeted with a comparable level of grass-roots hoopla: buzzed, booktalked and big-mouthed for months before it appeared on any bookstore display table. When “The Hunger Games” finally reached its intended audience, 12-to-18-year-olds, it proved to be as big a hit as Chittenden and her colleagues had predicted. Kids, it turned out, loved it just as much as all those adults who have made it their life’s work to discover the books kids will love. (Go figure.) From that point, it only got hotter: There is no more fertile petri dish in which to grow world of mouth than a high school. When “Catching Fire” was published the following year, it instantly shot to the No. 1 spot on the USA Today bestseller list.

“The Hunger Games” also arrived at a moment when many adult readers had turned to YA fiction for their own recreational reading. Several booksellers cite a boom in YA blogs as contributing to spreading the word about the series. “The [bloggers] we know,” said Hebert, “who come to our store all the time and to our events, they seem to be women in their mid-20s. They’re not teens, but they don’t have families yet, most of them.” These bloggers network with each other constantly via Twitter and Facebook, and when the “Hunger Games” sequels came out, they were often first in line for the midnight release parties. “They’re great, because they get just as excited as we do,” said Hebert. “And they can actually come at midnight. A lot of our customers are too young to stay up that late.”

Scholastic didn’t just sit back and watch all this transpire. They buttonholed booksellers and librarians at conferences with books in hand, insisting that everyone they knew had to read this advance reader’s copy as soon as possible. They distributed banner ads, countdown clocks and a grainily ominous book trailer. They went through countless iterations of the cover before settling on an iconic mockingjay emblem as an appropriately unisex image for the franchise. But as the American publishers of the ultimate word-of-mouth phenomenon, Harry Potter, they also bow to the power of what van Straaten calls “kismet.” With “The Hunger Games,” “We got it in the hands of the right people. That’s what publishers do,” she said. “You’re leveraging one thing to build the next thing. You need the enthusiasm internally to convince that first layer of gatekeepers. Once you have the kudos of those people, you can get these people, and so on.” “The viral world changes monthly,” said Scholastic’s Coun, “so our marketing has to change along with it. Still, the traditional thing — you read the book and it’s a great book — is what’s going to sell it the most.”

By now you’ve probably noticed that two prominent elements of the book-publishing landscape — Amazon and ebooks — have yet to crop up in this story. While Amazon was as enthusiastic as other booksellers about the publication of “The Hunger Games” (and Collins is a member of the elect Kindle Million Club — a half-dozen authors who have sold more than a million titles in the Kindle format), the e-tailer just doesn’t have the community presence of a bricks-and-mortar children’s bookstore.

High school teachers aren’t checking in with Jeff Bezos to find out what to assign to their classes next fall. Desperate parents don’t ask him for a title that will get their 14-year-old son reading again. Furthermore, teenagers and younger children still list browsing in bookstores and libraries as the primary ways they find out about new books and authors. They’ve been much slower to adopt e-books than older readers. Some observers think this is because e-reader devices are too pricey for kids; others say that kids see print books as a pleasant break from staring at screens all day. YA titles are selling well in various e-book platforms, but no one knows how many of these books are being bought by the growing adult readership for YA.

The possibility of “The Hunger Games” crossing over to adult readers (the Holy Grail for children’s book marketers) got its first big public boost when Stephen King reviewed it for Entertainment Weekly (even if he only gave it a B) a few days after the book came out. Not long after that, Stephenie Meyer, whose “Twilight” also made significant inroads with adult readers, raved about “The Hunger Games” on her blog: “I was so obsessed with this book I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table so I wouldn’t have to stop reading,” she wrote. This was major. Meyer doesn’t just have a lot of fans; she has a lot of fans who will read pretty much whatever she tells them to.

How did the Meyer recommendation come about? Van Straaten, like a lot of children’s book publicists, makes a habit of mailing out advance reader’s copies of her own favorite Scholastic titles to her peers. One of the people she sent “The Hunger Games” to was Meyer’s publicist, who loved the book and — even though it’s published by another house — urged it on Meyer. Suggesting that the creator of your company’s flagship property might want to plug a competitor’s new product would be unthinkable in most other industries. But at that moment, neither woman was thinking about business. They were just two readers, spreading the word.

Publishers actually make less money with the agency model, so why have they insisted on it? The change was designed to limit the growing dominance of Amazon over American book retailing. On Monday, Scott Turow — the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent” and other legal thrillers, and the president of the Authors Guild — posted a letter to members on the Guild’s web site. In it, he pronounced the Justice Department’s actions bad news for authors, “grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture,” and (contrary to first impression) ominous for book consumers. I called him up to find out more.

What are some of the Guild’s problems with Amazon?

First of all, so that I don’t get dismissed as an ingrate, I should say that Amazon has been a boon for bestselling authors. Authors get paid on the basis of the cover price for a hardcover book. By discounting, which is something that chain stores started and Amazon continued, they have lowered the barriers to book buying in ways that have been personally extremely beneficial to me.

Because you get paid the same amount regardless of how much the retailer charges for the book, and the discounting encourages more people to buy the book?

Exactly. These are not personal complaints. There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They’re innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I’m not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven’t been, so far, good to their customers.

So what’s the problem?

The concern is that they are getting so large and they compete so ruthlessly that there’s a lot of fear for what the world with Amazon in charge is going to look like.

The Guild’s beefs with Amazon became pronounced over the issue of the resale of new titles some years ago. This was something that Amazon pioneered. They would sell you a [just-released] book on Day One, buy it back from you on Day Two, and then resell it to another customer on Day Three. This was legal, but certainly not what anybody ever intended.

Traditionally, in hardcover, that’s been basically a split of the proceeds between the author and publisher. (An aside: That’s something we’re fighting with publishers about in the digital world.) So Amazon decides to go into competition with the publishers by reselling the book they just bought. The publisher gets paid nothing, and neither does the author. It’s a pure profit for Amazon.

Now, the reason you don’t see used bookstores within new bookstores is that the used books compete with the new books and the publishers supplying the new books would object. Either you’re doing business with me or you’re competing with me. I’m not going to sell you books so you can take some percentage of sales.

The problem of course was the Amazon had gotten so big that publishers were afraid to resist that. It’s not the mere fact that they’re competing [with their own suppliers]. I can certainly understand that it’s good for consumers to be able to buy a book two days later at a lower price. It’s the fact that the publishers were afraid to dismiss Amazon.

Which is what they would do with a regular retailer who was doing the same thing but had viable competitors?

Right, and of course, Amazon was undercutting authors in the process. We tried to persuade them to just window this [delay making used copies of brand-new books available for a period of time, the way the release of the DVD of a movie is delayed until after it has played in theaters]. That didn’t work. It was a muscle-flexing exhibition by Amazon, saying, “We’ve got so much market power, you guys can’t do what you’ve traditionally done and take your goods elsewhere. We represent at least 30 percent of the book market.”

I don’t like losing sales, but the real problem is at the margins. Midlist authors have been struggling to survive for decades now. If you start eating into the publishers’ returns, then at the bottom of the food chain, those books are just not going to get published. We have seen that happen.

Are there other examples of Amazon using its predominance?

They now control the print-on-demand market. That’s when you buy a book and only then does a service print a copy — literally on demand. [This is a method used by academic and small presses, as well as by authors with otherwise out-of-print books.] Amazon bought a POD service called BookSurge. Then they informed their customers — university presses and some other publishers who the Guild had organized to do POD for Authors Guild members — that they would not list their books on Amazon’s site unless they paid BookSurge more for their services.

I don’t know how they defend themselves on this one. That’s another very ominous sign to the book industry and authors.

What about their history with e-books?

They deserve a lot of credit for the Kindle, for yoking e-ink with this nationwide wireless network. It’s a great innovation. And they said to the publishers, “It’s really important to us in introducing this platform that e-books appear at the same time as the hardcover edition.” Publishers said, “Oh, we’ve seen your tricks before, Amazon! Why would we ever do that?”

So Amazon says, “We’ll pay you the same amount we pay you on a hardcover.” So publishers think that sounds fine, how can they complain about that? They agree and are then stunned when Amazon announces that they’re going to sell every e-book at a loss, for $9.99. That’s an average loss of $4 to $5 a book.

Why would Amazon do that?

I suppose they could argue they were doing it to sell devices and that may well have been one of their intentions. It had the additional benefit of making it much harder for any of their competitors to enter the market.

For example: A lot of people have the habit of going into a physical store, looking at books and then turning around and buying the e-book wirelessly from Amazon. Had it not been the case that you had to sell an e-book at a $5 loss, bookstores would have been able to say, “Sure, bring your device with you and we’ll sell you the e-book right here.”

Bookstores are pretty hard-pressed by book discounting as it is, and the idea of selling ebooks at a loss made it impossible for them to enter the marketplace in competition with Amazon.

What about the proprietary format of Kindle? Didn’t that also make it hard for competing e-readers to enter the market?

You couldn’t read all those books you bought from Amazon on a competitor’s device — you can now, if you have an iPad, but you couldn’t then.

The nook is widely regarded as the better e-reader device, but if you’ve accumulated a library of Kindle titles, you can’t take them with you if you decide to switch. [Technically, you can, but most users would find this quite challenging.]

Barnes and Noble developed the nook because they really had no choice but to compete with Amazon. They were struggling at that point, and I personally don’t think they’d have been able to survive while losing $5 on every book. There simply were not a lot of people jumping into that market to compete, not with the prospect of losing $5 on every book sale. From the outside, it looks like the pricing was not just a loss leader on the devices, but a way to discourage competition.

How did Amazon’s e-book pricing affect authors?

One way that 25 percent of net became the standard royalty for e-books was because publishers said, “We all know they can’t go on selling e-books at a loss forever and sooner or later this pricing structure has got to change.” They told authors they couldn’t agree to a different royalty because everyone knew that Amazon wouldn’t be paying them $14 to $15 per title indefinitely.

You’re implying that Amazon planned eventually to use the consumer’s habituation to $9.99 books to force publishers to charge Amazon lower wholesale prices for books. They’ve tried to do that recently with some small presses, removing their titles from Amazon unless the presses agree to sell their books at rock-bottom wholesale prices. And publishers would have no choice but to agree because every other competitor would also have been driven out of the market by Amazon’s predatory pricing?

Certainly, that’s what publishers assumed.

The other thing Amazon could have done once they had the market to themselves — and this is virtually inevitable — is that they would have raised prices to consumers.

That’s part of the less-known history behind anti-trust laws. Once a large company has spent its capital to fund predatory pricing and drive its competitors out of business, there’s no reason to keep selling for cheap. The low prices don’t last.

Right. Look, if what they’re into is maximizing profits, then if they were to have a monopoly there’d be no rationale not to use the monopoly power to increase prices to consumers. Now, if I were on the other side, working for Amazon, I’d say “Show me where I’ve done that.”

Presumably, they haven’t done it yet because they haven’t achieved the monopoly yet. Historically, that’s what monopolies always do.

Correct. That is historically what monopolies do. There is plenty of precedent for that. It’s only rational to fear what they’re going to do with this accumulation of power.

Again, the concern from the author’s perspective is that e-books are putting a tremendous downward pressure on the price of books in general. That’s putting tremendous pressure on publishers to survive. And I think a world in which online book selling is driving bookstores out of existence is a pity.

How did Amazon respond to the entrance of Apple and the agency pricing system?

Apple offered to sell books on the iPad using the agency model — which is what they use for iTunes — and the publishers one by one agreed to that. Then they told Amazon they were going to follow this new model, and that they were going to produce the e-books themselves rather than Amazon doing so.

When the first publisher, John Sargent [of Macmillan], told them that, Amazon responded by removing the buy buttons not just from all of Macmillan Publishing’s e-books — about which you can say, yeah, there’s a legitimate dispute — but from their print books, too. Paper, physical books! It was another demonstration of their ability to abuse their market power.

They used their market power over an item where pricing was not in dispute to punish a publisher for taking what Amazon regards as an unfavorable position in a different market.

Why should where their books are bought make a difference to authors?

New authors traditionally are nurtured by bookstore personnel, especially in independent bookstores. These people literally hand sell books to their customers, by saying, “I’ve read this. I think you’re going to love it.” Not to mention the fact that a bookstore is a small cultural center in a community. That’s definitely a loss.

Again, my concern is for the sake of literary diversity. If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It’s not that people won’t burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline — but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

When that decreases, the diversity of the literary culture decreases. The store of new ideas and the richness of the discussion all decreases.

Further reading

Scott Turow’s letter to the Authors Guild membership

The Wall Street Journal on the Justice Department’s threat to sue Apple and five book publishers for price fixing

Still, the dream of interactive books lives on, despite a series of digital disappointments ranging from hypertext fiction to CD-ROMs to experimental Web novels to current ventures in social reading. Previously, I wrote about the inherent tensions between interactivity and narrative in enhanced fiction e-books. Indeed, there’s little evidence that images, videos, sound effects or clickable doohickeys add anything of value in the eyes of most readers of prose fiction. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the enhanced e-book of Stephen King’s novel “11/22/63″ contained a 13-minute film by King himself, yet only 45,000 readers were willing to shell out the extra $2 to get it, compared to 300,000 who bought the unadorned e-book ($14.99) or the 1 million purchasers of the print edition ($35). King’s publisher expressed doubts that enhanced e-books were worth the extra trouble and expense.

Nonfiction, however, is another matter. While some developers labor in vain to improve upon the immersive storytelling of novelists like King, others are taking factual material that might have once been published between hard covers and turning it into strange and wondrous new creations. The most successfully enhanced e-book is the one you may not even recognize as a book.

The first among these were introductory science apps like “The Elements” (used to showcase the iPad’s potential when the device was first released) and astronomy apps like “Solar System for iPad” and “Solar Walk.” A recent release, “Back in Time,” lets the user turn the hands of a cosmic clock and scroll through a series of images to explore a timeline of the history of the universe. All of these books — for that’s the category they’re given in Apple’s App Store — use touch-responsive 3-D animation and other model-like features to help the reader visualize concepts well outside their everyday experience: vast distances in time or space, the motion of the planets and the relationship between molecular structure and palpable objects. Technically, I know that the earth’s tilted axis as it orbits the sun determines the changing seasons, but “Solar Walk” allows me to see it happen.

The popularity of science apps like “The Elements” no doubt encouraged Apple to move aggressively into digital textbook publishing with its recent upgrade to iBooks. The iBookstore, with its too-broad categories and abysmal metadata, has failed to emerge as a contender among retailers of trade e-books. Apple now seems to be concentrating its energies on the education market. IBooks titles can incorporate an array of visual, audio and video features, which make it possible for publishers to create books like “The Elements” for older students. Sometimes the results add little more than eye candy, sometimes not. The sample book released with the upgrade, “Life on Earth” by E.O. Wilson, sports a lot of beautiful photographs and videos, few of which are particularly informative, but the animations of cell activity do help make the weird-looking structures of the microscopic world comprehensible.

Whole categories of routine instructional books are in the process of being digitally revolutionized. Cookbooks can include demonstration videos for beginners and advanced forms of recipe organization for more practiced cooks. You can better learn to lift hand weights or fix a car or do card tricks from a combination of text and video. There’s not much glamour or art in enhancing such practical titles, but there’s a lot of common sense. The linearity of stories may be fundamental to the pleasure they offer, but in books like these, linearity was always merely arbitrary, imposed by the print book form. Hardly anyone reads them one page at a time, in order, from cover to cover.

Even a work of substantive narrative nonfiction, however, can be genuinely enriched with some basic multimedia add-ons. The enhanced edition of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” comes with several short videos featuring the Mumbai slum dwellers who serve as the main characters in that remarkable book. These films form a moving version of the photographic inserts traditionally tipped into the center of biographies and histories. You can’t read the book without wanting to know what these people look like. However, since most readers deciding which version to buy haven’t read the book yet, it will be interesting to see how many are willing to spring the extra buck for the edition with the videos.

Boo shot the footage on a Flip camera as part of her research. Once upon a time (say, two years ago), these videos might have been offered for free on the author’s or publisher’s website. But not every nonfiction author just happens to have a lot of documentary images and video on hand, waiting to be repurposed for publication. The great problem with any e-book enhancement is cost. Original artwork, video and animation must be commissioned or the right to use preexisting works obtained. That gets expensive — really expensive. Voice-overs and readings call for the skills of professional actors. The whole kit and caboodle then has to be inserted into the text, which depending on how well-integrated it is, may require the expertise of programmers.

Most authors and book publishers aren’t in the business of producing this sort of thing. Add to that a prevailing attitude among consumers that e-books ought to be cheaper than their print counterparts — no matter what extras they include — and there’s not much incentive for book publishers or authors to take the trouble. As understandable as this reluctance may be from a business perspective, it’s still disappointing. Imagine how much more enlightening, say, a book on popular physics or the military campaigns of Alexander the Great or the current fiscal crisis might be with a few well-considered moving or interactive images.

An example, and one of the few enhanced e-books considered a genuine success, is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” an examination of the popular right-wing response to the counterculture of the 1960s. The enhanced e-book edition includes 27 clips, taken from CBS News archives, illustrating key events in a highly televised period of American history. Each clip is embedded in the page that refers to it. But bear in mind that the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, is a division of CBS, which surely made it much easier to obtain the rights to use those clips.

“Nixonland” started with a (celebrated) text, then added video. NBC News recently announced the formation of a digital book publishing division that works in reverse. It will produce titles on current events and personalities with the clips as the springboard, and then incorporate text from published books, NBC staff writers and freelancers. Companies who already know how to make videos, animated graphics and complex websites have the edge when it comes to publishing multimedia e-books. All they have to do is hire some professional writers. Traditional book publishers, on the other hand, have to figure out how to commission several types of visual media despite having little experience in working with anything but text. Besides, writing is cheap, right?

Not so fast. Complaints from app consumers about the weak writing in some otherwise spectacular digital books suggest that corner-cutting in this department is rife. Programmer- or designer-driven works often borrow text from Wikipedia and other public-domain sources, and this does not go unnoticed. One happy exception is the recently published “Skulls by Simon Winchester,” an app by Touch Press, the company responsible for “The Elements” and last year’s groundbreaking T.S. Eliot e-book, “The Waste Land.” The ever-debonair Winchester, bestselling author of “The Professor and the Madman,” not only wrote the text that accompanies the app’s 300 rotatable images of human and animal skulls (as well as artifacts representing the human head) — he also reads it. The result is informative and thoughtful as well as gorgeous and diverting. More, please.

Further reading

The Wall Street Journal on enhanced e-books

“The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal documents the epic fact checking of “What Happens There,” an essay D’Agata wrote about a teenager who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Their exchanges merit publication in part because D’Agata is the leading light of a literary movement (largely confined to MFA programs in creative nonfiction) advancing the “lyric essay,” a form that combines elements of poetry with the prose essay. D’Agata has been militant in asserting his liberty as an artist to alter, invent or ignore facts in writing his essays, as well as critical of the eruptions of outrage that greet the increasingly commonplace discovery that some celebrated memoirist has embellished or fabricated parts of his or her work.

If this face-off between a meticulous establisher of truth and a bold champion of poetic license strikes you as a bit contrived, then I say: well spotted! A provocative excerpt from the book appeared in Harper’s last week, featuring each man performing his role to the hilt. Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion.

This excerpt is not a fair representation of the book, but then the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process. The impression has been given that Fingal is a paid fact checker for Harper’s, the magazine that originally commissioned D’Agata’s essay. Actually, he was an intern for the Believer magazine, a literary journal that picked up the piece after Harper’s declined to publish it and that encourages its interns to volunteer for ambitious projects and pursue them independently. When Fingal tells D’Agata, early on, “It’s the job I was assigned to do, so I have to do it,” he is — ironically enough — not being strictly accurate.

Any lingering impression that Fingal is a put-upon toiler in the boiler room of journalism dissolves as he introduces more and more tedious digressions and unfunny wisecracks into an ever-burgeoning pissing match. Many of Fingal’s quibbles — such as asking D’Agata for notes on a guided bus tour he took as a college student in 1994, or insisting that the mountains southeast of Vegas look “brownish” to him, rather than “black” as D’Agata described them — are so over-the-top that the writer’s snappishness becomes understandable.

Fact checking, contrary to vague popular perceptions, is something of an art; not only does each publication have its own policy for substantiating facts, but each checker has his or her own approach. Nevertheless, there are many constants. Fingal’s method is eccentric, to say the least. For example, he tracks down and transcribes the National Institutes of Health’s definition of a drug that one of D’Agata’s quoted sources mentions only in passing, yet he never seems to have contacted any of the sources themselves, either to check their quotes or to verify their titles or biographical details. Much of what he does is unnecessary by even the most rigorous of magazine fact-checking standards (and glossy-magazine fact checking is as rigorous as it gets), and yet he neglects some basic techniques of verification.

D’Agata is no better advocate for his position. He offers the “rhythm” defense more than once, and when Fingal raises legitimate questions about his attempt to present suicide as a universal taboo across cultures and historical periods, he stoops to the retort, “Wow Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine.” (Although it must be said that this is a pretty fair characterization of the tenor of their arguments.) It’s not until late in the game that D’Agata engages Fingal in a substantive discussion of what he’s trying to do, best stated as “taking liberties” to make “a better work of art — and thus a better experience for the reader — than I could if I just stuck to the facts.”

The bonehead comments-thread response to this assertion is “There’s a name for that: fiction.” But there are enough confirmed facts in “What Happens There” — real names, people, places and events — that it doesn’t constitute fiction, either. Of course, the whole dispute could be fairly easily defused by labeling D’Agata’s work as a lyric essay and including an editor’s note (for the many readers as yet unfamiliar with the genre) explaining that it contains factual material but is not restricted to factual material. That describes most contemporary poetry, after all. A magazine like Harper’s might decide that it isn’t comfortable publishing prose works of this kind, but no reader could claim to have been misled.

Such a reasonable solution, however, would severely reduce the opportunities to grandstand about how today’s readers don’t “have enough deep experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw, to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience both anew, with fresh eyes,” and so on. (Why is it that people defending purportedly innovative art always seem to fall back on the most shopworn cliches and the hokiest Romantic-hero narratives to do so?) D’Agata’s rhetoric in this section of “The Lifespan of a Fact” is so overblown in comparison to the substance of his quarrels with Fingal that the effect is comical. The freedom to remove a “clunky” comma from the name of a school or to “streamline” quotes from a newspaper interview seems unlikely to catapult a piece from a pedestrian bit of reporting to a “an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning.”

Nevertheless, a case can be made for what D’Agata wants to do, and in his defense he maintains throughout “The Lifespan of a Fact” that he doesn’t claim to write “nonfiction” or “journalism,” and has never espoused or promised factual accuracy in his essays. However, he is (in “What Happens There”) writing about the death of a real person, a boy named Levi Presley, and Fingal suggests that the “gravity” of this subject urges greater fidelity to accuracy in each detail. D’Agata replies, “The important thing here is the search for meaning … I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”

Here is the crux of the matter and one in which fact checking plays an overlooked role. When I first read “What Happens Here,” long before I became aware of D’Agata’s provocateur status, I could barely finish it, and abandoned the rest of the book. The authorial voice was insufferable — preening and self-important. Many writers are indeed vain, but the good ones are able to keep this from infecting their work. Vanity has the effect of blinding an artist to the very truths D’Agata intends to pursue.

No genre scourges a writer’s delusions of grandeur and omnipotence more fiercely than nonfiction. The fact checker is its whip. Yes, as Fingal discovers in the final pages of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” even official records can contradict each other and sometimes the truth is impossible to determine. But most of the friction between D’Agata and Fingal in “The Lifespan of a Fact” doesn’t involved disputed facts, only aesthetically inconvenient ones. D’Agata would prefer that his interpretation and depiction of reality not be encumbered by having to accommodate such facts. He thinks his essays are better because he refuses to do so.

What effect does it have on a writer to be constantly confronted with facts that interfere with his or her stories about the world? It can certainly be maddening, as many a writer subjected to the ministrations of an overzealous fact checker can testify. It can mean 30-minute conversations about utterly meaningless quibbles. Fact checkers can also save your ass, a service that may not mean much to someone like D’Agata, who doesn’t care about being accurate, but which I have deeply appreciated every time I’ve benefited from it.

Mostly, however, fact checking — not just the experience of being fact-checked but often the mere expectation of it — makes you pay more attention to the world around you. It compels you to stop insisting on what you want things to be and to come to terms with what they are. It is, above all, a humbling experience, a perpetual process of correction that, far from instilling a false sense of certainty, makes you ever more alert to the myriad ways you can screw things up by falling in love with your own ideas or accepting a conventional truth at face value.

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D’Agata’s magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters aren’t subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it’s good for you.

I sat down with my iPad to read “The Yellow Submarine” with a friend’s 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features — the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps in a paper pop-up book — although few of these could steal his ongoing fascination away from the iPad’s system-wide “pinch to expand” feature. Nini was aggravated by her brother’s pinching, tapping and swiping, and shouted, “I’m trying to read the story!” (Neither one cared much about either the music or the videos, incidentally.) Instead of a cozy interlude of reading, we had a fight.

Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.

The latest crop of enhanced e-books struggle mightily to overcome this dilemma. The vast majority of such books are kids’ titles, for the simple reason that literature for young children has always included images. The pictures give kids something to look at as the books are being read aloud to them, and this helps cement the relationship between printed and spoken language. Every children’s e-book offers a read-aloud feature in which a recorded voice recites the text. Most offer the ability to tap individual words to hear them spoken aloud. Parents understandably believe that these apps will help their kids learn to read — and that they make tempting, but still educational, alternatives to television.

The most celebrated children’s e-book at the moment is “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore,” an app created by the Louisiana-based Moonbot Studios. “Morris Lessmore” is also a film, one of the five nominated for best animated short in the 2012 Academy Awards. It’s about a boater-wearing bibliophile who gets blown by a hurricane to a magical library where the books fly around like birds and quote their most famous lines. It’s not much of a story, but it looks fabulous. Nevertheless, you can tell a medium is in trouble when artists in some other form start making gooey nostalgic tributes to its inherent “wonder.” Although “Morris Lessmore” is sort of an e-book, it’s mostly a movie, apparently because only a movie can do justice to the glory of reading.

Moonbot’s follow-up, “The Numberlys” is even more gorgeous than “Morris Lessmore.” A visual tribute to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and set in a colorless, industrial world of numbers, it’s about five homunculi (looking just like the little men holding hands around the edges of Chinese pincushions) who invent the alphabet. “The Numberlys” allows its “reader” to help in this manufacturing project by shooting projectiles, bouncing objects and spinning devices to fabricate each letter. What the app illustrates is that the more sophisticated an enhanced e-book becomes, the more closely it resembles a game. Text is even more marginalized in “The Numberlys” than it is in “Morris Lessmore,” and while the result is charming, no parents should kid themselves that it will help teach their kids to read; it’s more likely to teach them how to play “Angry Birds.”

By now, the theory that the novel of the future will be a game has become almost venerable. That’s despite indications that — as the critic and author Tom Bissell pointed out in his book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” — narrative and interactivity are in fundamental respects incompatible. Where games offer the pleasure of mastery, narrative offers the pleasure of surrender. You can beat “Halo, ” but you can’t win “To Kill a Mockingbird”; the notion doesn’t even make sense. A “Hamlet” in which Hamlet can blithely decide to kill his uncle as soon as his father’s ghost tells him to is not “Hamlet,” and, furthermore, not that interesting. Part of the power of that story is its feeling of inevitability, the understanding that each event follows from those preceding it and ultimately derives from the nature of each character.

This potent sense of causality, along with a subtle balance of expectation and surprise, is the great storyteller’s secret weapon. When you find yourself caught up in a story like a swimmer in a riptide, unable to tear yourself away, chances are you feel immersed in another world. You know it’s not real, but somehow, for a while, it has become far more palpable than the reality around you. You can almost see the characters, feel the cold wind on their faces, hear the pursuing footsteps of the villain, and your heart speeds up. You may even become oblivious to your immediate surroundings. (Video games can create a similar sense of immersion via different means, which is one reason why the two are sometimes confused.)

Narrative constructs this alternate reality in your imagination, and narrative sustains it. What matters is not the story on the page — or the screen — but the story in your head. Interactive baubles pull a reader’s attention back to the screen, serving as a reminder of the thing you want to go on forgetting: the fact that all of this is just made up, words on a page. Some enhanced e-book publishers have cottoned onto this problem and as a result they’ve moved away from inserting video or clickable illustrations into their books, and in new directions.

Take, for example “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” an iconic Sherlock Holmes story frequently chosen by e-book enhancers as a giveaway to demonstrate their wares. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works are in the public domain.) Recently, I read the story three times, in three different enhanced formats.

The first, a Vook edition, represents one of the earliest stabs at an enhanced e-book. It presents the complete text with interspersed videos offering background information on Baker Street and Holmesian detection techniques. Some of these mini-documentaries are narrated by a man wandering around the streets of London, inexplicably dressed in formal evening wear and top hat and looking like a music hall performer, but you can’t expect “Masterpiece Theatre”; a problem with adding videos onto books is that it’s expensive to produce. Some of the videos are interesting, but only after you’ve read the story, which means there’s no particular reason why they should be packaged with it.

A newer company, BookTrack, dispenses with video entirely and sells books with accompanying soundtracks that keep time with your reading. If it’s a dark and stormy night in the story, the soundtrack plays rain effects. BookTrack’s accompaniment to “The Speckled Band” mostly consists of crackling fires, ticking clocks and chirping birds (for the scenes in the countryside). This is pleasant enough, but once I slipped into the tale (which works surprisingly well even when read three times in a row), I largely ignored it. Perhaps this indicates a kind of success — at least I wasn’t distracted from Holmes’ exploits. On the other hand, I was so intent on the old house of my imaginings that I didn’t need creaking floorboards and footsteps to make it more present. And as someone who resents overbearing movie soundtracks instructing me on how to feel about every scene, the music was simply obtrusive.

The most enjoyable version of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is published by Byook (I know, I know). It’s sort of an adult picture book that features both BookTrack-style soundtrack and marginal illustrations that soak into the page over the course of a minute’s reading. These reminded me of the elaborately decorated editions of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books passed down to my siblings and me from my father’s parents; hovering at the periphery of my vision, they really were atmospheric without being distracting. And because Conan Doyle’s story hangs on the layout of a room and of the rooms along a creepy corridor, a couple of the illustrations were actually helpful. An abridged version of the original story (heretical to purists, but I can’t say I minded), the Byook “Speckled Band” also features some fine original full-screen art in a style resembling paper cutouts, a little like the full-page plates routinely found in print novels during Holmes’ time.

Being shown the floor plan of the Gothic Stoke Moran manor house isn’t essential to understanding “The Speckled Band,” but it didn’t pitch me out of the imaginative space of the story, either. To the contrary; having to puzzle too hard over the text to visualize the configuration of a scene (as I did when I first read the story, at age 12) can sometimes break a story’s spell. When an author’s fictional world is very complex, and spans several volumes — as is the case with, say, George R.R. Martin — it’s easier to see how an enhanced e-book can help sustain the illusion of an alternate reality, rather than undermining it. Martin’s U.K. publisher, HarperCollins, has just come out with an enhanced e-book of “Game of Thrones,” with maps that track the characters’ movements and a glossary so readers can look up any character whose identity has temporarily slipped their minds — Martin has created over 1,000 of them.

For the most part, though, fictional narratives, when they work, don’t really need digital enhancements. When they don’t work, the enhancements can’t save them. Suzanne Collins’ series “The Hunger Games” seems piercingly vivid to her millions of young (and not so young) readers, even though none of the print editions of the books have contained a single image of her heroine. An expertly told story is all the enhancement most works of fiction require.

But, of course, not all books are fiction or narrative. It’s with nonfiction — a vast category of books, unfortunately defined by what it’s not — that the enhanced e-book offers the most thrilling potential and the most illuminating accomplishments. I’ll be taking a look at those next week.