For years, it was a schedule as predictable as a calendar: novelists who specialized in mysteries, thrillers and romance would write one book a year, output that was considered not only sufficient, but productive.

But the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.

They are trying to satisfy impatient readers who have become used to downloading any e-book they want at the touch of a button, and the publishers who are nudging them toward greater productivity in the belief that the more their authors’ names are out in public, the bigger stars they will become.

“It used to be that once a year was a big deal,” said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. “You could saturate the market. But today the culture is a great big hungry maw, and you have to feed it.”

The push for more material comes as publishers and booksellers are desperately looking for ways to hold onto readers being lured by other forms of entertainment, much of it available nonstop and almost instantaneously. Television shows are rushed online only hours after they are originally broadcast, and some movies are offered on demand at home before they have left theaters. In this environment, publishers say, producing one a book a year, and nothing else, is just not enough.

At the same time, the Internet has allowed readers to enjoy a more intimate relationship with their favorite authors, whom they now expect to be accessible online via blogs, Q. and A.’s on Twitter and updates on Facebook.

Some of the extra work is being pushed by authors themselves, who are easing their own fears that if they stay out of the fickle book market too long, they might be forgotten.

Ms. Scottoline has increased her output from one book a year to two, which she accomplishes with a brutal writing schedule: 2,000 words a day, seven days a week, usually “starting at 9 a.m. and going until Colbert,” she said.

The British thriller writer Lee Child, who created the indelible character Jack Reacher, is now supplementing his hardcover books with short stories that are published in digital-only format, an increasingly popular strategy to drum up attention for the coming publication of a novel.

Mr. Child’s first story, a 40-page exploration of Reacher as a teenager, was released last August, several weeks before his latest novel came out in print. On the advice of his publisher, he is planning to write another digital-only short story this summer.

“Everybody’s doing a little more,” said Mr. Child, who is published by Delacorte Press, part of Random House. “It seems like we’re all running faster to stay in the same place.”

Even John Grisham is working overtime. Mr. Grisham, who used to write one book each year, now does an additional series aimed at middle-grade readers, the popular “Theodore Boone” novels that are published annually.

Publishers say that a carefully released short story, timed six to eight weeks before a big hardcover comes out, can entice new readers who might be willing to pay 99 cents for a story but reluctant to spend $14 for a new e-book or $26 for a hardcover.

That can translate into higher preorder sales for the novel and even a lift in sales of older books by the author, which are easily accessible as e-book impulse purchases for consumers with Nooks or Kindles.

Jennifer Enderlin, the associate publisher of St. Martin’s Paperbacks, said the strategy had worked for many of her authors, who saw a big uptick in hardcover sales, book over book, once they started releasing more work.

“I almost feel sorry for authors these days with how much publishers are asking of them,” Ms. Enderlin said. “We always say, ‘How about a little novella that we can sell for 99 cents?’ ”

That has replaced a carefully plotted print publication system, when readers waited eagerly for the yearly release of a favorite author’s novel. At that rate, publishers reasoned, readers would never be overwhelmed by content.

Today’s readers seem incapable of being overwhelmed.

Scott Schiefelbein, a lawyer in Portland, Ore., wrote an enthusiastic review last month on Amazon.com of “Second Son,” a short story by Mr. Child that Mr. Schiefelbein read after buying his latest novel, “The Affair,” on his Kindle.

There is “no limit” to the number of Mr. Child’s books he would buy, Mr. Schiefelbein said.

“I’ll give basically anything he writes a chance,” he said. “With my favorite authors, I always want to read more from them.”

Some of the biggest authors have become so productive that they are nearly an impossible act to follow. Airport bookstores these days can feature not just one stack of James Patterson books, but by an entire rack of them, sometimes more than six titles at a time. Mr. Patterson produced 12 books last year, aided on some titles by co-writers. He will publish 13 this year.

“A lot of publishers and authors have looked at what James Patterson is doing and realized, ‘I may not be able to publish nine books a year, but certainly I can do two,’ ” said Brian Tart, the publisher of Dutton, an imprint of Penguin. “They were able to grow him and grow the readership using that strategy.”

(The new expectations do not apply to literary novelists like Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen, who can publish a new novel approximately every decade and still count on plenty of high-profile book reviews to promote it.)

Publishers also believe that Salinger-like reclusiveness, which once created an aura of intrigue around an author, is not a viable option in the age of interconnectivity. “Particularly now with social media, authors are constantly in contact with their fans in a way that they never were before,” said Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, Avon and Voyager, imprints of HarperCollins. “Now it seems to make more sense to have your author out in the media consciousness as much as you can.”

Authors don’t seem to be writing digital-only short stories for the money. Advances are typically not part of the bargain, and the works are priced so low (usually $0.99 or $1.99) that they don’t produce much revenue, even if they take several weeks or months to write.

But some authors said that even though they are beginning to accept them as one of the necessary requirements of book marketing, they still find them taxing to produce.

“I have been known to be a little grumpy on the subject sometimes,” said Steve Berry, a popular thriller writer who writes short stories that are released between books. “It does sap away some of your energy. You don’t ever want to get into a situation where your worth is being judged by the amount of your productivity.”

You wrote Wild Swans 21 years ago but the book is still banned in China. Is there no sign of the censorship lifting?
The repression is very much there. Mao’s portrait is still on Tiananmen Square; his face is still on every Chinese banknote. He was responsible for the death of over 70 million Chinese in peacetime. The history of 20th-century China is still taboo – you have to toe the party line. If you don’t, you get banned.

Do you believe one day it will be read freely?
I thought the growing wealth and openness of the country with the internet would allow books like Wild Swans to get published, but I’ve lost faith. The Communist Party seems to have found a way of having economic achievement and keeping a tight control.

There must be copies that circulate in China?
People have scanned the book on to the internet for other people to download. This is a form of piracy, but one that I totally endorse. But, of course, China also has a big internet police.

How aware are you of their presence?
I’ve seen censorship working in front of my eyes, here in London. I was looking at a Chinese blog about my biography of Mao and when I was halfway, a box appeared which said, “This piece is currently under examination.” A few seconds later the whole thing went, and another box ­appeared: “This piece has been censored.”

To you, how much has China changed?
I go back once a year to see my mother. It has changed tremendously. I grew up in Chengdu, and my mother still lives there, but the city is unrecognisable, which is very sad. I’ve seen the destruction of old China. The China of my childhood was very different from the China of my youth. After the Great Leap, things were destroyed; and then in the Cultural Revolution, the city wall in Chengdu was dismantled to make place for a giant statue of Mao. After I left in 1978, there was another wave of destruction.

Why do you think the destruction continues?
There’s no sense of heritage. Mao destroyed the culture and produced a generation of philistines who do not appreciate culture. Now, people
are money-mad and property is the thing that makes money. The regime made a positive decision to channel people’s energy into money-making so they won’t be interested in politics.

China is now commonly described as the leading superpower. But is this simplistic, given the poverty that still exists?
It does frustrate me. There is huge discontent and also a huge lack of moral authority. The country seems to be still worshipping Mao. I can’t imagine a leading world power that has any kind of support from the rest of the world if you still worship a mass murderer.

Is it the eradication of culture that motivates you to write about the old China?
Most people want to write not because they have grand ideals, but because they simply love writing. That’s the case with me.

What is it about writing that you love?
It gives me immense tranquillity; it makes me feel most at peace with myself if I sit there engaged with a project I love. Mao was a bad man, but he was a very good subject – I was totally engrossed. Twelve years went by, only with ­regret that they were gone.

What are you working on now?
I’m writing a book about the [Qing] empress dowager Cixi. She ruled China for decades, far longer than Mao. It was she who really brought China into modernity, but she has been maligned for a hundred years [Cixi died in 1908].

What drew you to her?
I first got interested in her when I was writing Wild Swans. My grandmother had bound feet and I was under some impression, because of Communist propaganda, that foot-binding was banned by the Communists. In my research, I discovered that it was the empress dowager who banned foot-binding at the beginning of the 20th century. I got very interested in her.

Is there a relief in not writing about yourself?
I loved writing Wild Swans, but it was quite painful. Writing Mao was painful but it was a different kind of pain. Wild Swans helped me transform my past into memories. I can’t tell you how important that is. Once they become memories, you can talk about them without feeling unbearable pain. Before I wrote Wild Swans I had nightmares. But now that’s gone.

Do you vote?
From time to time.

Is there anything you would like to forget?
There was a time, when I first came to this country, that I wanted to forget about China and my past. I went around telling people I was South Korean because I didn’t want them to ask me questions about China.

Are we all doomed?
I would not say we are not doomed, but I’m not certain we are doomed. I sometimes do have an ominous feeling.

Defining moments

1952 Born in Sichuan Province, China
1978 Moves to Britain for a year’s study. Wins scholarship from University of York
1982 Is awarded PhD in linguistics
1991 Publishes Wild Swans, her memoir of three generations of her family
2005 Mao: the Unknown Story, co-written with her husband, Jon Halliday
2012 Marks 21 years of Wild Swans. Speaks at Words in the Park, west London, 19 May (wayswithwords.co.uk)

These challenges are the outcome of two processes. On the one hand, the publishing business has been transformed beyond recognition by a set of profound social and economic changes that have been underway since the 1960s, resulting in the publishing landscape we see around us today: a handful of large corporate publishers based in New York and London and owned by large multimedia conglomerates; an array of powerful agents who have become the unavoidable gateway into publishing for writers and would-be writers; and a retail landscape dominated by a dwindling number of retail chains, mass merchandisers and Amazon.

On the other hand, the technological upheaval associated with the digital revolution is now having a major impact on the book publishing business. After a decade of numerous false dawns, e-books have now arrived and they are here to stay. In 2006, e-book sales amounted to only around 0.1 percent of the overall revenue of large US trade publishers – an accounting irrelevance. Today this figure is around 20 percent, and for some kinds of books, like romance, science fiction and thrillers, the percentage can be 60 percent or more – a huge change in five years. The digital revolution is disrupting many of the traditional practices of the publishing industry, opening up new opportunities and at the same time threatening to dislodge some of the players who have shaped the business of book publishing for half a century or more.

So where is book publishing now headed? Will the traditional print-on-paper book become a relic of a bygone age, a collector’s item to be found only in second-hand bookstores and garage sales, much like the old vinyl LP? Will publishers – and perhaps agents too – be displaced by a flourishing of self-publishing and by powerful online retailers like Amazon who can offer to publish writers’ work on royalty terms that are much more favorable than those traditionally offered by publishing houses?

The truth is, no one knows the answers to these and similar questions. Many people have opinions but no one knows a thing. There is a great deal of apocalyptic speculation about the future of publishing but most of it is just that – speculation. I’ve studied the publishing industry closely for the last 10 years and I’ve seen how often the predictions of so-called experts – often expressed with a great air of authority – have turned out to be wrong. We are living through a revolution of sorts, and one of the few things you can say for certain about a revolution is that when you’re in the middle of one, you have no idea where and when it will end.

However, as I say in the new paperback edition of my book Merchants of Culture [Plume, $17.00], some short-term trends are easy enough to see. Here are seven:

First, Amazon will continue to grow as a retail channel, while bricks-and-mortar booksellers (including the bookselling chains like Barnes and Noble) will find themselves squeezed further and further, leading to more bookstore closures and downsizing on the part of the chains. In many ways, the bankruptcy of Borders in 2011 marked the end of an era, in the sense that the age dominated by the big retail chains, rolling out their superstores across America, is now over. We’re entering a new era when those retail chains that remain are in a much weaker position and where Amazon has become the main retail force to be reckoned with.

Second, publishers with weak balance sheets and companies that are highly leveraged will face growing financial difficulties, the pressures on medium-sized publishers will intensify and some of the large conglomerates will probably decide that the time has come to divest themselves of their trade publishing interests, which were always a very small part of their overall business anyway, leading to further consolidation in the hands of a small number of large corporations that remain committed to trade publishing and continue to see it as a worthwhile part of their portfolio.

Third, the decline of retail space in bookstores – the shop windows, front-of-store display tables and rows of bookshelves – and the decline of book review space in traditional print media like The New York Times will make it harder for publishers to get their books noticed, so the struggle for visibility will both intensify and become displaced, as publishers are forced to devote more and more of their marketing effort to the online environment, where they will hope to find new ways of bringing their books to the attention of readers.

Fourth, the shift from print to digital will continue, though the speed and extent of the shift will vary from one type of book to another and one author to another, and income from e-books and other forms of electronic sale will become an increasingly significant part of publishers’ revenues, though exactly how significant is, at this point in time, unknown – maybe 20 percent, maybe 30, maybe 50, maybe more, no one knows.

Fifth, as more sales shift to digital and the sales of physical books decline, the large publishing houses will face growing downward pressure on their revenues, calling into question their ability to generate year-on-year growth and refocusing their attention more and more on the reduction of costs and overheads in an attempt to maintain or improve their profitability.

Sixth, the infrastructure supporting the traditional book supply chain – warehouses, sales forces, etc. – will come under increasing pressure, forcing publishers to scale back their operations and look for new ways to keep the physical supply chain going while at the same time trying to shift their organizations to a new way of doing business.

Seventh, small publishing operations and innovative start-ups will proliferate, as the costs and complexities associated with the book supply chain diminish, and threats of disintermediation will abound, as both traditional and new players avail themselves of new technologies and the opportunities opened up by them to try to eat the lunch of their erstwhile collaborators.

Beyond these short-term trends the picture is much less clear. In all likelihood the future of publishing will be a mixed economy of print and digital rather than a one-way shift from print to digital, and the most successful publishers will be those who are able to structure their businesses in a way that enables them to take full advantage of both.

She didn’t want to sell her book and short stories on its Kindle Direct Publishing Select program, something she calls “too restrictive to authors.” Instead she chose an alternative book distributor based in the San Francisco Bay Area called Smashwords.

“I want my work to be available in as many places as possible,” she said.

In the e-book market, Amazon.com is the biggest name in the game. But, as criticism mounts — especially from people who believe that Amazon, and specifically, it’s KDP Select Program, can hurt rather than help writers — alternatives like Smashwords are on the rise.

But can an independent author afford to bypass Amazon, especially when it provides so much exposure to self-published e-books? So far, the answer isn’t a clear one.

THE CRITICISM

Most of Amazon’s criticism comes because of the KDP Select program. For most authors at the Kindle Store, books are usually split between two prices — 99 cents and $2.99. At $2.99, Amazon’s take is only 30 percent with 70 percent going to the author. At $2.98 and below, the author’s take is only 35 percent.

But the KDP program offers more visibility on Amazon if authors agree to give their book away for free for five days during a 90-day period. The author must also sell exclusively at the Kindle store for those 90 days. While the subject is a hot topic on the Kindle boards, many authors are already a part of the program in hopes of getting momentum and their title climbing the Kindle charts. “Charts are everything for Amazon publishers,” said Erica Sadun, an independent and traditionally published writer. “Chart position gives you momentum.”

Authors are also asked to loan out books for free at the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library for a chance at a pot of $600,000.

“Successful books are not in this program,” Sadun said. “It’s the ones trying to get market traction and trying to climb those charts.” It is one of the few ways that people can successfully market a book that would have no market otherwise, she added.

Questions sent to Amazon for comment on the KDP Select program and its new publishing arm went unanswered.

AMAZON ALTERNATIVES

While that may be true, some say that Amazon’s heavy-handed attitude is hurting independent authors, and writers are looking for alternatives to the Amazon juggernaut.

Hudson, a writer from Hayward, Calif., has a chapter from a future book distributed by Smashwords as well as “No Red Pen: Writing, Writing Groups and Critique,” a handbook on giving better writing critiques.

“Smashwords was an easy way to get the electronic version out to a lot of markets,” she said.

Mark Coker created the Los Gatos, Calif.-based Smashwords four years ago after trying to get his own book, “Boob Tube,” published.

“The more I thought about the issue, the madder I got that a publisher has the power to stand between me and my potential audience,” he said.

Now Smashwords has more than 37,000 authors and publishers and 100,000 e-books in 32 countries — with a 60-85 percent royalty for authors.

Coker doesn’t like the KDP Select program because he questions its fairness. “It’s using self-published authors as pawns as a broader campaign to wage war against retail competitors,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the exclusivity requirement, I would be a big supporter of KDP Select. I love the idea that an author can receive payment when it’s borrowed.”

The exclusivity also hurts authors, he said. “We lost 6,000 to 7,000 books around the Christmas season,” he said. “Yes, in three months you can bring that book back, but you have lost any momentum that you had.”

Despite his dislike of some of Amazon’s practices, Coker holds no animosity toward the company nor does he suggest writers have any. “For those authors who do not work with Amazon out of principle, that’s not a behavior I would encourage,” he said. “Authors should be everywhere.”

BookBaby offers a $99 ‘self-publishing made easy’ option

Another alternative to publishing on Amazon is Portland, Ore.-based BookBaby, which has a $99 “self-publishing made easy” option which formats e-books, offers cover design, and has a better-known sister company called CD Baby that sells independent music. It distributes its books to the iBookstore, Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony Reader and others.

“We are taking nothing from the back end and passing on 100 percent of net royalties, so authors get to keep all of the money they earn,” said Brian Felsen, president of BookBaby. “Our payments are timely and transparent, and we pay immediately upon receipt from our partners.”

Hyperink is a new kind of e-book publisher, one that comes with $1.2 million in venture capital funds and seeks out experts to write targeted e-books.

Kevin Gao, a co-founder of digital publisher Hyperink, said his company looks at search engine data, book sales, and tables of content to find out the hottest book topics. “In general, there are two types of authors: professional writers who are freelance writers interested in writing e-books and experts with an area of expertise,” he said.

Gao said the year-old Hyperink launches about 100 titles a month on Kindle, Kobo and the iBookstore, and royalties to authors typically run 25-50 percent. But if experts need help organizing material or their thoughts, or the company needs a quick-hit e-book, Hyperink finds freelance writers to take on the task.

Zach Demby, a 28-year-old writer from Oakland, Calif., answered one of Hyperink’s initial calls for writers. He penned an 8,000-word study guide or “quicklet” for the book “Freakonomics” and was paid $200. He received no royalties.

“I just found them on Craigslist,” he said. “They paid a flat fee plus royalties … But I didn’t expect any royalties.” Now with pay rates cut, Demby said he would rather put his efforts into more lucrative freelancing and his own work.

A recent Hyperink call for writers stated it was looking for new freelance writers to take on 5,000- to 8,000-word quicklets ranging $80 to $130 plus 15 percent royalties.

Gao said rates for writers have gone down on a per-word basis since its launch. “There’s a lot more supply and a lot of writers out there looking for work,” he said.

AMAZON’S NEW PUBLISHING TWIST

While the alternatives to Amazon exist, independent authors would be wise to watch what the online retailer is doing. Amazon is reinventing itself and becoming a traditional publisher, making it more difficult for writers to ignore the company on principle.

While the Kindle Store still handles the majority of e-book sales, Amazon has been busy creating its own stable of authors. It began its own publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, last May and published 122 books last fall. The publishing house now has six imprints: romance, mysteries, science fiction and fantasy, international authors, emerging authors, and how-to books. Would-be authors can now submit their book proposal directly to Amazon.

The courting of authors could easily edge out both publishers and agents by offering a direct-to-print service.

“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives, told the New York Times. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

Barbara E. Hernandez is a native Californian who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has more than a decade of experience as a professional journalist and college writing instructor. She also writes for Press:Here, NBC Bay Area’s technology blog.

TULSA, Okla. — Plenty of people are upset at Amazon these days, but it took a small publishing company whose best-known volume is a toilet-training tome to give the mighty Internet store the boot.

The Educational Development Corporation, saying it was fed up with Amazon’s scorched-earth tactics, announced at the end of February that it would remove all its titles from the retailer’s virtual shelves. That eliminated at a stroke $1.5 million in annual sales, a move that could be a significant hit to the 46-year-old EDC’s bottom line.

“Amazon is squeezing everyone out of business,” said Randall White, EDC’s chief executive. “I don’t like that. They’re a predator. We’re better off without them.”

It is an unequal contest. EDC has 77 employees, no-frill offices on an industrial strip here and a stock-market valuation of $18 million — hardly a threat to Amazon, a Wall Street darling worth $86 billion. But Mr. White’s bold move to take his 1,800 children’s books away from the greatest retailing success of the Internet era is more evidence of the extraordinary tumult within the book world over one simple question: who gets to decide how much a book costs?

The Justice Department last week sued five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, simultaneously settling with three of the houses. The publishers say they were not illegally colluding but simply taking advantage of a new device platform — Apple’s iPad — to sell their e-books in a different way, where they controlled the prices.

The publishers wanted to stop Amazon from using what one of them called “the wretched $9.99 price point,” according to court papers. Selling e-books so cheaply, they feared, would solidify Amazon’s robust grip on the business while simultaneously building a low-price mind-set among consumers that could prove ruinous to other bookstores and the publishers themselves.

EDC does not produce e-books, but saw exactly this happening with its physical inventory. Amazon was buying EDC’s books from a distributor and discounting them to the bone, just as it does with everything it sells. This might have been a boon for readers, but it was creating trouble with other retailers who carry the company’s titles, as well as with EDC’s network of independent sales agents, who market its books from their homes.

“They were becoming showrooms for Amazon,” Mr. White said. “We were shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Amazon is generally reluctant to explain its business practices and declined to comment for this article. But its executives say it is shaking up an antiquated business model by eliminating middlemen and passing the savings on to consumers. Publishers that try to cling to the past, they have said, will die.

The retailer’s growing list of critics, however, argue that Amazon has $48 billion in revenue but hardly any profit, proof that its approach is opportunistic and unsustainable. When traditional publishers, booksellers and wholesalers are destroyed, these opponents say, Amazon will be left with a monopoly that will be detrimental to the larger health of the culture.

In recent months, the dispute over Amazon’s strategy of selling books below cost has boiled over from several directions.

During the holiday season, Amazon encouraged customers to use physical stores as showrooms before ordering more cheaply online, a move that infuriated bookstores in particular. Publishers and distributors say that Amazon, never exactly shy in negotiating terms, has been more assertive in its quest for ever-better deals.

In February, Amazon demanded better margins from the Independent Publishers Group, a Chicago distributor of dozens of small imprints. IPG balked, so Amazon removed nearly 5,000 of the company’s e-books from its site.

“Amazon wants the price of books to be very, very low — lower than the publishing community can support,” said Curt Matthews, IPG’s chief executive. “Making a book is still a craft industry. Books need to be edited, to be publicized. Someone needs to say this is good and this is not. If there is not enough money to support that whole chain, the system will break down.”

Publishers have often been ambivalent about Amazon. On the one hand, it offers an extraordinarily efficient method of distributing their wares. Readers anywhere can easily order the most obscure volume and have it delivered the next day. With e-books, access is even easier, but publishers’ vulnerability is compounded; Amazon controls not just the method of distribution but the actual device the text is consumed on.

“Last year was the best in our 37 years, mainly due to the way Amazon was pushing the books,” said Bryce Milligan of Wings Press in San Antonio, an IPG client. “Then Amazon cut us off because they couldn’t get a better deal. Now our e-books sales are down 50 percent.”

If publishers and wholesalers feel threatened, writers are caught in the middle — both pawns and prize.

Ted McClelland, a writer in Chicago, had two IPG e-books dropped by Amazon. He just got a royalty statement on one of them, “Horseplayers: Life at the Track.” Half of his modest income on the book came from Kindle sales on Amazon.

“I don’t know whether Amazon is being greedy or IPG is being cheap, but I’m caught in the middle,” Mr. McClelland said. “What matters to me is getting my books back on Kindle.”

Here in Tulsa, EDC operates out of offices on the eastern outskirts in a less-than-glamorous district of warehouses and auto supply shops. Like IPG, it is primarily a distributor, selling picture books developed in England by Usborne Books to toy stores and bookshops in the United States. Its publishing line, Kane Miller, produces the popular “Everyone Poops” book and its sequels.

EDC’s so-called consultants — a direct sales force of about 7,000 women — sell to friends and acquaintances as well as their local schools. For a while the party plan was successful. Sales more than doubled from 2000 to 2004.

In recent years, though, the consultants have found it rough going. They would pass around a picture book like “The Noisy Body Book” or “Guess How Much I Miss You,” talking it up, and then the customer would order it online. Sales fell about 20 percent. Frustrated consultants began quitting.

What happened in February to Christy Reed, a sales consultant in Pleasanton, Tex., was becoming all too routine. Her school district decided to order 16 copies of a science encyclopedia and a science dictionary but then completed the deal on Amazon.

“I worked so hard to sell those books,” Mrs. Reed said. “I had to talk to so many different people. Then I lost the sale to a couple of clicks on the computer.”

She acknowledged that the district saved a few dollars but added: “I’m here, in the neighborhood. I went to school here. My kids went to school here. Yes, they got the books for less. But my earnings go back into our community. Amazon’s do not.”

After Mr. White, EDC’s chief, heard about that episode, his exasperation with Amazon peaked. Several times in the past, he had grappled with the retailer. He tried to get it to lower its discount on his books three years ago, but a tentative deal did not stick, he said. He was outraged that the company did not collect sales tax, which had the effect of making its books even cheaper.

Two months ago, he asked his biggest wholesaler, Baker & Taylor, to stop selling all EDC books to Amazon. When Baker & Taylor refused, Mr. White canceled its account. Baker & Taylor declined repeated requests to comment about EDC.

Of EDC’s $26 million in annual revenue, Baker & Taylor was responsible for about 6 percent, most of which was because of Amazon. Mr. White, a trim 70, said that when he made the decision to bail out, his blood pressure soared. But he’s also reveling in the excitement, just a little. He commissioned a drawing of EDC in the role of David taking on the giant Amazon. “I’m Type A,” he said. “I don’t mind a fight.”

Somewhat to Mr. White’s surprise, EDC is doing better without Amazon, at least for the moment. (Some of its books are still available on Amazon from third-party sellers.) Sales in March rose, in part because of new accounts like a toy store in Round Rock, Tex., that placed an initial order for 61 books. And colleagues in the business have been congratulating the publisher, or at least expressing their admiration for Mr. White’s guts.

“I tell them, ‘You never had the chance to make 7,000 women happy in one day,’ ” he said.

But all the travel e-books and mobile app guides in the world put together are still less handy than a sturdy little guidebook you can hold in your hand.

Among the various brands — Frommer’s, Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, Moon, DK, Rick Steves and more — there are likely enough volumes to pave China. Many of them publish in e-book form too, spinning travel advice through the digital realm.

I am partial to print, but times are not good for the print travel guidebook. Their sales fell 28% in the last six years in the U.S., says Stephen Mesquita, editor of the Nielsen BookScan Travel Publishing Year Book.

Between 2008 and 2011, travel book publishers’ print revenues plunged from $190.3 million to $149 million, according to Albert Greco, marketing professor at Fordham University, who monitors the book publishing industry. Last month, publisher John Wiley & Sons put its Frommer’s brand up for sale.

While some travel-watchers have predicted the demise of printed travel guides, using words like “extinction,” and “redundant,” that probably is too strong, Greco says. Although travel books are migrating to digital formats, real books continue to have a place in a traveler’s backpack. They can be toted where there is no electricity.

Printed maps beat apps, especially for older eyes. Books don’t scream “rich tourist” like an e-reader does. Sometimes, flipping through a book is just easier. Last year, 4,221 print books and 711 e-books about travel were published or distributed in the United States, according to preliminary data from Bowker Books in Print.

“Print continues to sag, but it continues to exist,” Greco says. That is lucky for those who prefer to travel by the book.

Like shoes, a travel book’s appeal is in the eye of the beholder. But among the recent crop of books, here are 10 just-published or about-to-be-published volumes that are useful and worthwhile for your summer travel planning. E-book versions are noted when available.

“The London Mapguide (7th Edition)” (Penguin, $12) — Capsule version of London highlights is complemented by extraordinarily detailed street maps. This is the map to use when visiting London as a student, tourist or while attending the Olympics. The $12 cost of the book is a bargain compared to the major roaming charges you’d rack up searching map apps on your mobile phone.

“The Milepost 2012 — Alaska Travel Planner (64th Edition)” (Morris Communications, $29.95) — New version of the bible of Alaska travel offers tips from the Klondike Loop to the Denali Highway. It has mile-by-mile descriptions of highways and attractions in the 49th state. Having this hefty guide on your passenger seat while driving 847 miles between Anchorage and Prudhoe Bay is pretty reassuring.

“PassPorter’s Walt Disney World 2012″ by Jennifer, Dave and Allison Marx (PassPorter, $24.95) — Disney is so popular that most books on the subject are updated every year. I like this family-friendly guide that has organizing folders in back and clear maps, ratings, reviews and updates. Worth its weight in good advice. Later this year, the guidebook series will expand to Disney cruises.

“Top 10 Iceland” (DK Travel, $14) — This new tome in a popular series focuses on a mysterious yet trendy destination that’s now easy to reach from the United States — thanks to more airlines flying the route.

“Travel Guide to Italy” (Lonely Planet, $25.99) — For travelers roaming far from Rome, this color guidebook has a more elegant presentation than usual, but keeps the gritty Lonely Planet voice. Available in Kindle and Nook formats.

“Family Guide Washington, D.C.” (DK, $25) — Chunkier than the slim “Top 10″ series, but it’s more complete. DK invented a simplified layout for travel guides that is rich with photographs, illustrations and small boxes on each page. Some of the type is tiny, so get the kids with jet-pilot vision to eyeball it for you. Available in Kindle and Nook formats.

“Explorer’s Guide Maine (16th Edition)” by Christina Tree and Nancy English (Countryman Press, $22.95) — A series best for people who seek calm, peaceful trips to beautiful, scenic spots, it offers intelligent guidance to the quirky state. Available in book stores June 4; Kindle and Nook formats available.

“Frommer’s Exploring America by RV” by Harry Basch and Shirley Slater (Frommer’s, $19.99) — It’s the latest edition of this RV advice book by a traveling power couple who constantly point themselves down the road and beyond the next curve.

“Fodor’s Nova Scotia & Atlantic Canada (12th Edition)” (Fodor’s, $16.99) — Most Americans know approximately nothing about Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, so pack this book while rambling through the land of “Anne of Green Gables.”

“Guide to National Parks of the United States (7th Edition)” (National Geographic, $26) — Stunning photos on every page. No sugary prose, just clear information about visiting, lodging and hiking excursions. You barely notice the type.

The liquidation last year of the American chain Borders, the competition from e-books and online retail, and the increasing amount of floor space devoted to lifestyle products at big bookstore chains like Chapters also bode ill for the future of bookselling.

But at least one scrappy independent is bucking the trend.

Twelve years ago, Chris Brayshaw opened his first Pulpfiction Books location on Main; at the end of January this year, he opened his third, this one on Commercial Drive.

“Sales are up many hundreds of percent over previous years, particularly on new books,” says Brayshaw, whose stores sell both new and used.

Pulpfiction isn’t the only store that has weathered the changes. “It feels like a lot of independent booksellers are re-energized,” says Bryan Pike. As executive director of Rebus Creative, which oversees the B.C. Book Prizes, Pike travels the province, touring with authors and meeting and talking to booksellers.

“We’re getting more ballots back for the Booksellers’ Choice Award. And there are quite a few healthy independent booksellers in B.C.”

Bookstores are surviving by becoming more than just a place to buy. Books & Company in Prince George, which on its website bills itself as the town’s “living room”, is “a real hub of the community,” notes Pike. “The chess club meets there; there’s a coffee shop. There are still quite a few of those kinds of bookstores around.”

To some extent, independents have thrived in communities that have kept out the big-box stores, says Pike. But even in places that have let in the massive retailers, “people have their bookstores. It’s kind of their routine.”

Brayshaw has been lucky; he was on the frontline of the bookstore wars when Chapters moved in around the corner from where he worked at Granville Book Company, the independent seller in Granville Mall that closed in 2005, after 19 years in business. He could see what mistakes his employer and Duthie Books, also nearby, were making. The latter, he says, was stuck using a dated business plan, such as maintaining old store hours. “I would walk by Duthie’s on Robson just after 7, and it would be dark,” recalls Brayshaw. “Then I’d walk by Chapters and it would be packed.”

In some ways, however, Duthie Books was prescient—as Celia Duthie notes, the independent chain had the first major online database of books, long before the arrival of Amazon. “We envisioned it coming,” says the former bookstore owner. The last remaining store, on West 4th Avenue, closed two years ago. At one time, the bookseller had 10 branches in the Lower Mainland.

“It was no fun to lose the empire,” Duthie recalls. Now living on Salt Spring Island, she runs the Duthie Gallery, which showcases landscape art and studio furniture, mostly by Vancouver artists (“I’m dealing with much more tangible items that can’t be digitized,” she notes).

“I felt that we really cared about local books,” says Duthie. “The whole B.C. book industry came up around Duthie’s, and we were all extremely sad to see it go. But the future is here. The distribution of entertainment is quite different now.”

The independent bookstores that have survived she sees as mostly “hobby bookstores”.

“I don’t want to make gloomy prognostications,” she adds. “But there’s no question it [the book industry] is shaking down big time. I had a talk with Bill [William] Gibson not long ago about it, and he said, ‘All my smartest friends say the same thing—they don’t know what’s going to happen.’ ”

It may be that those “hobby bookstores” that have survived have seen the worst of the threats to their existence. Some, like Banyen Books, may have done this by remaining staunchly niche-oriented—although, as Brayshaw points out, that new-age bookseller also owns its property. And for every niche-oriented bookseller that has stayed afloat, another—like multilingual Sophia Books—has gone under.

If the closure of Borders and the lifestyle-item creep in Chapters are any indication, it’s the big-box bookstores that are now in danger.

“I think the days of the seven- to 10-thousand-square-foot superstore in the suburbs are definitely numbered,” says Brayshaw, who notes that he reads Chapters’ quarterly reports “with great interest”.

“The basic bookselling business appears to be profitable,” he says, “although the margins are not great. Chapters recently sold off their Kobo e-reading division. Otherwise, their sales would have been nothing to write home about.”

Independents still have something the chains lack, and which gains value as it becomes more scarce: the feeling that they’re run by book lovers and not algorithms. At Pulpfiction’s Main Street location, a couple of shelves hold staff picks—books that you might otherwise never have considered, much less come across.

“A lot of people are like, ‘I used to shop online because of the pricing, but your pricing is pretty much equal on most stuff, and you don’t charge me shipping, and I get to come into a local place and bullshit around with you guys,’ ” says Brayshaw.

Pulpfiction also seems immune to the rise of Kobos and Kindles. “The people I have lost to e-books I don’t think were my core customers,” says Brayshaw. “They were people who used the library or bought whatever the bestselling flavour-of-the-month was off a bargain table at Costco.”

Duthie sees e-readers differently, though. She finds the convenience of digital books to be an advantage over shopping at brick-and-mortar bookstores. “As a reader I always saw this as being a completely ideal situation—when you want something you can get it instantly.”

Brayshaw isn’t letting digitization or the general industry downturn get in the way of his ambitions, however. He says he hopes one day to be known for having not just the best bookstore in Vancouver, but one of the best in North America. Powell’s, the huge but homey Portland shrine to print, is an inspiration.

“I want to have that kind of feeling—a for-profit business that still makes you happy when you’re in it,” says Brayshaw. “As someone who’s involved with print culture, knowing it’s alive and healthy makes me happy. I’m buoyed up by the idea that a community can support a business that size, of that complexity and of that beauty. It’s like church to me.”

When the digital dust settles from the battle over e-book pricing between Amazon, Apple (AAPL), publishers and the Justice Department, much of it will end up in the aisles of small independent booksellers like Green Apple Books in San Francisco.

“I’m not worried about this bookstore going out of business one or two years from now, but I wouldn’t necessarily open a new bookstore today either,” said owner Kevin Ryan. He says the federal antitrust lawsuit to stop Apple and major book publishers from keeping e-book prices high, and Amazon’s subsequent vow to lower its prices, can’t be good news for the mom-and-pop bookstores struggling to weather a sea change in the publishing business.

“This impacts us directly for the first time,” Ryan said, adding that until now he could sell e-books for the same price as Amazon, offering his customers both print and digital books as the latter continue to gain traction among readers. The recent developments threaten that, he said, “because for the first time ever, we can’t offer our customers the same price they’d get at Amazon. Now we have nothing except loyalty to keep people coming in.”

Booksellers were already an endangered species as their paper-loving clientele turned increasingly to reading books on digital devices like Amazon’s Kindle, the Nook from Barnes & Noble and Apple’s iPad. The demise last year of the Borders chain provided a bit of relief, as sellers suddenly saw new faces in their stores. But lately, things have turned dark again, starting with Google’s (GOOG) recent decision to stop supplying e-books to privately owned bookstores like Books Inc. in Palo Alto, where manager Tanya Landsberger says about 10 percent of their sales are e-books sold through their website.

The lawsuit and Amazon price cuts complicate matters even more because stores will be left with only print products and relatively expensive e-books, assuming they can find a new supplier to replace Google.

Google “gave us eight months to figure out what to do,” she said, “but at this point we don’t know where our e-books will come from. And now the lawsuit is like adding salt to the wound.”

Booksellers like Landsberger worry that the feds’ decision to go after Apple and its publishing partners effectively clears the path for online retailer Amazon, which uses a different sales model, to monopolize the e-book space, driving customers to buy its Kindles, but eventually raising its prices without any competitive headwinds to dissuade them.

“By allowing Amazon to resume selling most titles at a loss, the Department of Justice will basically prevent traditional bookstores from trying to enter the e-book market, at the same time it drives trade out of those stores and into the proprietary world of the Kindle,” author Scott Turow wrote on the Authors Guild’s website. “Today’s low Kindle book prices will last only as long as it takes Amazon to re-establish its monopoly.”

Apple and the publishers defended their pricing policies, saying they are needed to weaken the book-selling dominance of Amazon, which controls 60 percent of the e-book market.

Shortly after the Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it was suing five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, Amazon announced plans to push down prices on e-books. The price of some major titles could fall to $9.99 or less from $14.99, saving voracious readers a bundle.

But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one.

“If the DOJ wins, it will be an unmitigated disaster for the e-book industry and very probably for authors who will lose a big chunk of their royalties. Amazon will be the big winner and will use e-books as a loss leader to lure new customers,” Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, said in an email Friday.

Doris Moskowitz, owner of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, said the latest developments are simply more blows to the already battered and shrinking world of independent book vendors. Over the years, she said, sales of e-books and e-commerce have hurt both the small bookstores and the overall commerce of printed books.

“Between Google, Amazon and Apple, these are all bullies. And they are going to do what they can to maintain what they can,” said Moskowitz. “They have gutted independents.”

Mercury News wire services contributed to this report. Contact Patrick May at pmay@mercurynews or follow him on Twitter at patmaymerc.

What’s going on

Developments in a case against Apple and book publishers over e-book pricing:

April 11: Justice Department and 15 states sue Apple and major book publishers, accusing them of conspiring to raise e-book prices. The government announces settlement with three of the publishers: Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. The two publishers named in the case are Holtzbrinck Publishers, doing business as Macmillan, and Penguin Publishing, doing business as Penguin Group.

April 13: Apple denies charges and says the company has instead fostered innovation and competition by introducing its iBookstore in 2010. The company insists customers have benefited from e-books that are more interactive and engaging.

Source: The Associated Press

Odds are increasing that a book ordered online hasn’t been printed yet. Nashville-based Ingram Content Group runs one of the book industry’s largest “print on demand” operations. Printing one copy at a time is a lonely bright spot for the traditional book industry, which has suffered as e-readers soar.

Roughly a billion more pages are being printed this way each month, according to research from IT Strategies. The driving force is a (not so) little company named Amazon.

“We actually show Amazon that we have 100 books on hand but we really have none,” says Larry Brewster, who helped found Ingram’s print on demand division called Lightning Source. “But we print the book real fast and ship it out within 24 hours, and they don’t know the difference.”

Ingram’s original facility sits near the company’s headquarters in LaVergne. Rolls of paper six miles long zip through printers in a blur of gray.

Printers have sped up over the last decade and now can do high resolution photos and color.

“These machines, when we started out [in 1998], would print maybe 500 or 600 pages a minute,” Brewster says. “Now they’re printing 2500 pages a minute.”

Those pages are collated just as quick and the edges chopped smooth. Only when the covers are slapped on is it clear – these are all different books coming off the same line.

And print technology has gotten so good, it’s hard to tell that the books didn’t come off a traditional press.

Warehouse vs. Database

“There’s a difference, but it’s really hard to discern,” says Bob Edington, a vice president at Nashville-based Thomas Nelson Publishers, which is moving more of its titles into the Lightning Source database.

Edington says it’s making less sense to keep some books on the shelves collecting dust when they’re only going to sell a few copies a year. Still, he says consumers expect to be able to purchase anything they’ve ever heard of.

“With online and digital storage, there is infinite shelf space,” he says. “So if it’s available and someone can find it, it could be very obscure, but someone will probably order it.”

It does cost more to print one copy at a time, but Eddington says money can also be wasted printing books that never sell.

Then sometimes the literary lottery hits, and someone like Glenn Beck spends an hour on TV calling Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom “brilliant.”

“Nobody would have thought a 1930s economic theory book would suddenly become a big seller,” says Ingram Content Group CEO Skip Prichard.

But the Lightning Source printers kept pace with tens of thousands of orders, Prichard says.

Coexisting

Besides being an answer for spikes in demand, Prichard sees a permanent way for the printed page to coexist with e-books, which is where the real growth in book publishing is.

“There are times when you might want a printed copy. And you could press the button on your device and we could make that book for you and have it at your house the next day,” he says. “We’re positioned to do that.”

Also in position is that goliath of book retailing – Amazon, meaning one of Ingram’s biggest clients is now a competitor.

Consultant Marco Boer with IT Strategies says the book printing world has been turned “upside down.”

“It’s a really dicey situation,” he says. “It’s causing a lot of uncomfortable conversations between publishers, between book printers, between retailers.”

Nashville’s Ingram Content Group is banking on being one of the middle men who makes it. The company expanded its Lightning Source operation late last month, with two new facilities in the U.S., and another in Germany.

NOT many readers would have visited Juna Market, the commercial hub of Karachi where hardware and spices compete with halwa puri to find buyers.

In the ocean of commodities catering to hedonistic pleasures stands a lone modest-looking bookshop that seeks to nourish the mind. It has been doing that for 102 years, an anomaly among its worldly surroundings.

More fascinating than the Abbasi Kutubkhana is the man who sits behind the counter, Habib Husain Abbasi, whose maternal grandfather founded this shop in 1910.

When he died in 1941, his son-in-law Abdul Rasool, who had been his apprentice for over two decades, took charge. His son, the present owner, took over in 1988 when his father passed away suddenly. He had just started writing his memoirs. Habib’s training was his 28-year apprenticeship with his father. He, however, managed to find time to carry on his studies at the Sindh Madressah and the S.M. College from where he graduated.

He is a bookseller in the true meaning the word. In his book Sketches of Some Booksellers of the Times of Dr Samuel Johnson, E. Marston writes of one of the ilk: “He was not a bookseller, but a gentleman who dealt in books.”

It clearly emerges from the sketches of the 10 or so individuals belonging to the 17th-18th century British book trade that being in the company of books and reading them avidly left a stamp on the men of the trade. Erudition, scholarship and eloquence became second nature to them. Intellectual discourse about men of learning was their favourite pastime.

If you read about Sultan Khan, the key figure in The Bookseller of Kabul by award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad, you will find similar attributes in him. In Seierstad’s words, the bookseller of Kabul felt let down by his country, time and again. After spending hours listening to his stories, she felt that “he was himself a living piece of Afghan cultural history, a living book on two feet”.

Habib Abbasi fits these descriptions aptly. Bookselling is a phenomenon which allows books to subsume the seller so totally that he becomes a part of them. Habib doesn’t see his work as a commercial activity. For him his vocation is an act of promoting education and knowledge — khidmat-i-khalq (service to humanity) he calls it.

By the time he was old enough to be browsing among the books his father stocked his shelves with so lovingly, the bookshop had already acquired a name. It became a focal point for scholars, publishers and other booksellers in the quest of knowledge. They came from as far-off places as Iran, Afghanistan and all over India. They still do — the latest visitor being Patrick Laude, professor of theology from Georgetown University and currently based in Doha.

Habib grew up in the company of books and scholars. He recalls the great names from the literary world who would visit the kutubkhana and fraternise with his father such as Allama Abdul Aziz Memon, the vice chancellor of Damascus university, Sindh’s Shamsul Ulema Dr Daudpota, lawyer Khalid Ishaq, well-known writer Pir Hisamuddin Rashidi, Sindh’s renowned scholars Mirza Kalich Beg and Pir Aga Jan Sirhindi, historian Rais Ahmed Jafri and many others. He is a living encyclopaedia on these legendary men of learning.

When I visited his shop on a public holiday — on a working day it is a challenge even for a pedestrian to negotiate his way through the entangled traffic — there was a constant flow of friends and visitors who knew that the Abbasi Kutubkhana was the place to go to for rest and recreation of the intellectual kind. Hence I found myself in pleasant company.

A bookshop is known by the books it keeps. There were no volumes of flashy pulp fiction adorning its shelves. There was a wealth of scholarship crowding the place from encyclopaedias of all variety in Urdu, Arabic and Persian to dictionaries of different languages. Fiction is of the classical variety such as Tilism-i-Hoshruba and Alif Laila which have resurfaced in popular interest.

How does Habib see the future prospects of the book industry in Pakistan? He is reticent and as a matter of principle keeps a low profile. He says he lacks the four key qualities for successful bookselling, namely Qaroon ka khazana (wealth), umr-i-Nooh (long life), sabr-i-Ayub (patience) and Ibn-i-Sina ka ilm (knowledge). He, however, suggests that big literary institutions and publishers — the Iqbal Academy, OUP, Institute of Islamic Culture, he names a few — should start a new tradition of working jointly in the field of book publishing. He feels that they have the resources, the know-how, manpower and networking capacity to produce researched books as agents of learning and scholarship. He feels that thus alone can they counter the challenges posed by piracy and junk publishing that have proliferated in the market. He also stresses the need to broaden our translation base which he feels is not sufficiently developed in Pakistan.

His suggestion reminds me of the two booksellers’ clubs that Marston writes about in his book cited above. One was the Friends of Literature comprising a group of London booksellers who met once a month to discuss literary affairs and also take business decisions on joint publications. The jointly published works were then divided among the booksellers to sell. Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe and Goldsmith’s Essays were some outstanding products of this club. There is no denying that we need more researched publications.