Agency Model renamed “Charles”; TeleRead gets reaction from publishing community

Recognizing that the so-called agency model is causing consumer discontent because of increased prices, the publishers behind the model called a press conference today to allay consumers’ fears. TeleRead was there.

“We don’t want to devalue ebooks” said the publisher spokesperson, “so we are taking a major step to benefit the ebook-reading public. From now on the “agency model” will be known as “Charles”. It’s a nice name and people can relate to it.”

When questioned by TeleRead, the publishers said that if their price increase had a friendly name then the public would like it. “We’ve never dealt directly with the public before, but we do know that members of the public have names. So if we give our price increase a name it becomes a member of the public. Yes?”

Random House, who is not participating in Charles, told TeleRead: “If it had been called “John” we would have gone along with the others. But how nuts is it to call a price increase “Charles” – we can’t agree to that.” Apple and Amazon declined comment, but Amazon did say that it’s declination was commercially more important than Apple’s.

Independent publisher Smashwords refused to go along with either “Charles” or “John”. “Naming a price increase is dumb”, said Mark Coker of Smashwords, “however if you submit the name to us we will convert it to Epub for free and let you sell the name for whatever price you want.”

Mike Shatzkin, publishing guru, told TeleRead: “I told them 10 years ago to give price increases names and it’s nice to see that they are finally taking my advice.”

Immediately after the announcement Tim O’Reilly unveiled a new conference to be called “Tools of Charles”. “We will have Charleses from all over the world”, said O’Reilly, “and none of them will have DRM. As a matter of fact, O’Reilly Publishing hereby gives everyone in the world the right to use the name Charles with no fee or license whatsoever.” Cory Doctorow immediately objected because he intended to give the world this right first, but got mixed up in his time zones.

TeleRead’s Editor once met someone on the street who had an uncle who knew a plumber in South Dakota who had a friend who once dialed a wrong number and actually got a real person at Google. Google, when contacted by phone said: “We’ve already scanned Charles and it belongs to us. If the publishers want to use Charles then they will have to either opt out of whatever the Hell we are doing or sue us in France. By the way, this phone number is now discontinued.”

The new owners of TeleRead, North American Publishing Company (NAPCO) said: “ebooks????”