Scant Proof Is Found to Back Up Claims by Energy Drinks

Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade.

Their rising popularity represents a generational shift in what people drink, and reflects a successful campaign to convince consumers, particularly teenagers, that the drinks provide a mental and physical edge.

The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels. But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.

“If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,” said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.

Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more. For example, producers claim that “Red Bull gives you wings,” that Rockstar Energy is “scientifically formulated” and Monster Energy is a “killer energy brew.” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, has asked the government to investigate the industry’s marketing claims.

Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.

As with earlier elixirs, a dearth of evidence underlies such claims. Only a few human studies of energy drinks or the ingredients in them have been performed and they point to a similar conclusion, researchers say — that the beverages are mainly about caffeine.

Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates.

“These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message.”

A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.

In the experiments, scientists injected large doses of the substance into laboratory rats. Afterward, the rats swam better. “I have no idea what it does in energy drinks,” Dr. Goodman said.

Energy drink manufacturers say it is their proprietary formulas, rather than specific ingredients, that provide users with physical and mental benefits. But that has not prevented them from implying otherwise.

Consider the case of taurine, an additive used in most energy products.

On its Web site, the producer of Red Bull, for example, states that “more than 2,500 reports have been published about taurine and its physiological effects,” including acting as a “detoxifying agent.” In addition, that company, Red Bull of Austria, points to a 2009 safety study by a European regulatory group that gave it a clean bill of health.

But Red Bull’s Web site does not mention reports by that same group, the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that claims about the benefits in energy drinks lacked scientific support. Based on those findings, the European Commission has refused to approve claims that taurine helps maintain mental function and heart health and reduces muscle fatigue.

Taurine, an amino acidlike substance that got its name because it was first found in the bile of bulls, does play a role in bodily functions, and recent research suggests it might help prevent heart attacks in women with high cholesterol. However, most people get more than adequate amounts from foods like meat, experts said. And researchers added that those with heart problems who may need supplements would find far better sources than energy drinks.

Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.

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Google’s Lawyers Work Behind the Scenes to Carry the Day

SAN FRANCISCO — For 19 months, Google pressed its case with antitrust regulators investigating the company. Working relentlessly behind the scenes, executives made frequent flights to Washington, laying out their legal arguments and shrewdly applying lessons learned from Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle in the 1990s.

After regulators had pored over nine million documents, listened to complaints from disgruntled competitors and took sworn testimony from Google executives, the government concluded that the law was on Google’s side. At the end of the day, they said, consumers had been largely unharmed.

That is why one of the biggest antitrust investigations of an American company in years ended with a slap on the wrist Thursday, when the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation of Google’s search practices without bringing a complaint. Google voluntarily made two minor concessions.

“The way they managed to escape it is through a barrage of not only political officials but also academics aligned against doing very much in this particular case,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has worked as a paid adviser to Google in the past. “The first sign of a bad antitrust case is lack of consumer harm, and there just was not any consumer harm emerging in this very long investigation.”

The F.T.C. had put serious effort into its investigation of Google. Jon Leibowitz, the agency’s chairman, has long advocated for the commission to flex its muscle as an enforcer of antitrust laws, and the commission had hired high-powered consultants, including Beth A. Wilkinson, an experienced litigator, and Richard J. Gilbert, a well-known economist.

Still, Mr. Leibowitz said during a news conference announcing the result of the inquiry, the evidence showed that Google “doesn’t violate American antitrust laws.”

“The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good for competition,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in a company blog post.

The main thrust of the investigation was into how Google’s search results had changed since it expanded into new search verticals, like local business listings and comparison shopping. A search for pizza or jeans, for instance, now shows results with photos and maps from Google’s own local business service and its shopping product more prominently than links to other Web sites, which has enraged competing sites.

But while the F.T.C. said that Google’s actions might have hurt individual competitors, over all it found that the search engine helped consumers, as evidenced by Google users’ clicking on the products that Google highlighted and competing search engines’ adopting similar approaches.

Google outlined these kinds of arguments to regulators in many meetings over the last two years, as it has intensified its courtship of Washington, with Google executives at the highest levels, as well as lawyers, lobbyists and engineers appearing in the capital.

One of the arguments they made, according to people briefed on the discussions, was that technology is such a fast-moving industry that regulatory burdens would hinder its evolution. Google makes about 500 changes to its search algorithm each year, so results look different now than they did even six months ago.

The definition of competition in the tech industry is also different and constantly changing, Google argued.

For instance, just recently Amazon and Apple, which used to be in different businesses than Google, have become its competitors. Google’s share of the search market has stayed at about two-thirds even though competing search engines are “just a click away,” as the company repeatedly argued. That would become the company’s mantra to demonstrate that it was not abusing its market power.

Claire Cain Miller reported from San Francisco, and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

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The Lede: Video of Pakistani Schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai Walking Out of Hospital

Video of Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani activist, leaving Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, on Thursday. The images were released without sound.

Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl who survived an assassination attempt by Taliban militants, was discharged from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, on Thursday.

Ms. Yousafzai “is well enough to be treated by the hospital as an outpatient for the next few weeks,” the hospital said in a statement. “She is still due to be readmitted in late January or early February to undergo cranial reconstructive surgery as part of her long-term recovery, and in the meantime she will visit the hospital regularly to attend clinical appointments.”

The complete text of the statement was posted on the hospital’s Web site, along with video of the girl walking out of her hospital room under her own power.

Dr. David Rosser, the hospital’s medical director said: “Malala is a strong young woman and has worked hard with the people caring for her to make excellent progress in her recovery.”

Ms. Yousafzai became an outspoken advocate for the education for girls in Pakistan at the age of 11, when the BBC’s Urdu-language service published her “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl.” The blog chronicled life under Taliban rule, after her home in the Swat Valley was overrun by the Islamist militants in 2009. (Later that year, the girl and her father were featured in a documentary by my colleague Adam Ellick.)

She was shot in the head by a militant in October and airlifted to England for treatment the same month.

Her father, Ziauddin, has been appointed to a three-year term as Pakistan’s education attaché in Birmingham, ITV News reported on Wednesday.

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Biogen Gives Up on Drug for Lou Gehrig’s Disease

A closely watched experimental drug to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease failed to work in a late-stage clinical trial, the drug’s developer, Biogen Idec, said Thursday. The company said it would discontinue further work on the drug.

Biogen said that the drug was not effective in either slowing the loss of muscular function or prolonging the lives of people with the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S.

There were also no signs that the drug, dexpramipexole, worked in any subgroup of patients, Biogen said.

“As a physician who has treated people with A.L.S., I hoped with all my heart for a different outcome,'’ Dr. Douglas Kerr, director of neurodegeneration clinical research at Biogen, said in a statement.

A.L.S., which attacks the nerves that control muscles, causes gradual paralysis and typically results in death within a few years of diagnosis. There are about 30,000 Americans with the disease.

There is only one drug approved to treat it, Rilutek, made by Sanofi, which doctors say has only modest effectiveness. Many other drugs have failed in clinical trials, in part because scientists do not understand the cause of A.L.S. and therefore do not know how to treat it.

While expectations had not been that high that dexpramipexole would succeed in its phase 3 trial, they were higher than for many previous A.L.S. drugs, given what some doctors viewed as strong results in a smaller, phase 2 trial.

“I’m more excited about this compound than any compound I’ve ever tested in A.L.S.,'’ Dr. Robert Miller, director of A.L.S. research at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, said in April on a call with investors hosted by Deutsche Bank. Patients getting the highest dose had an almost a 50 percent slower decline in muscular function than those receiving a placebo.

Biogen had licensed dexpramipexole from Knopp Biosciences, a privately held company in Pittsburgh. Biogen’s trial included 943 patients in 11 countries. The main measurement of success was a composite that took into account both deaths from the disease and the decline of functionality. Patients in the trial were allowed to take Rilutek.

Dr. Jeffrey D. Rothstein, director of the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said the results were disappointing but not surprising.

“We really, really need a new drug,'’ Dr. Rothstein, who was not involved in the phase 3 trial, said by e-mail. He said he thought the phase 2 results for dexpramipexole had been only “marginal,'’ so he was not surprised the latest trial did not succeed.

The reaction on Wall Street was somewhat muted because of the modest expectations for the trial to succeed. Biogen’s shares were down about 4 percent.

“We (and most of the Street) had characterized this trial as a high risk trial,'’ Mark Schoenebaum, an analyst at ISI Group, wrote in a research note Thursday.

Other companies are also developing drugs to treat A.L.S. Neuraltus Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company in Palo Alto, Calif., is preparing to enter the final stage of clinical trials for NP001.

The company announced in late October that its phase 2 trial, which involving 136 patients, failed to show a statistically significant benefit compared to a placebo. But the company said that 27 percent of patients getting the high dose of NP001 had no progression of their disease for six months, two and a half times as many as in the placebo group.

Cytokinetics, of South San Francisco, Calif., is in mid-stage testing of a compound, tirasemtiv, which might make muscles respond more forcefully to nerve signals.

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Hillary Clinton Is Discharged From Hospital After Blood Clot

Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose globe-trotting tour as secretary of state was abruptly halted last month by a series of health problems, was discharged from a New York hospital on Wednesday evening after several days of treatment for a blood clot in a vein in her head.

The news of her release was the first welcome sign in a troubling month that grounded Mrs. Clinton — preventing her from answering questions in Congress about the State Department’s handling of the lethal attack on an American mission in Libya or being present when President Obama announced Senator John Kerry as his choice for her successor when she steps down as secretary of state.

“Her medical team advised her that she is making good progress on all fronts, and they are confident she will make a full recovery,” Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton, said in a statement.

Mrs. Clinton, 65, was admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital on Sunday after a scan discovered the blood clot. The scan was part of her follow-up care for a concussion she sustained more than two weeks earlier, when she fainted and fell, striking her head. According to the State Department, the fainting was caused by dehydration, brought on by a stomach virus. The concussion was diagnosed on Dec. 13, though the fall had occurred earlier that week.

The clot was potentially serious, blocking a vein that drains blood from the brain. Untreated, such blockages can lead to brain hemorrhages or strokes. Treatment consists mainly of blood thinners to keep the clot from enlarging and to prevent more clots from forming, and plenty of fluids to prevent dehydration, which is a major risk factor for blood clots.

Photographed leaving the hospital, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, appeared elated. In a Twitter post on Wednesday, Chelsea Clinton said, “Grateful my Mom discharged from the hospital & is heading home. Even more grateful her medical team confident she’ll make a full recovery.”

Dr. David J. Langer, a brain surgeon and associate professor at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, said that Mrs. Clinton would need close monitoring in the next days, weeks and months to make sure her doses of blood thinners are correct and that the clot is not growing. Dr. Langer is not involved in her care.

Mrs. Clinton’s illness cuts short what would have been a victory lap for her at the State Department. With only a few weeks before the end of President Obama’s first term — the time frame she set for her own departure — she will be able to do little more than say goodbye to her troops.

But she will, at least theoretically, be able to testify before the Senate and House about the attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. She was not able to appear at a hearing in December because of her illness. Republicans, who have sharply criticized the Obama administration’s handling of the attack and its aftermath, had demanded that she appear to explain the department’s role, though in recent days they have modulated their request.

Mrs. Clinton’s blood clot formed in a large vein along the side of her head, behind her right ear, between the brain and the skull. The vein, called the right transverse sinus, has a matching vessel on the left side. These veins drain blood from the brain; blockages can cause strokes or brain hemorrhages. But if only one transverse sinus is blocked, the vein on other side can usually handle the extra flow.

In one sense, Mrs. Clinton was lucky: a clot higher in this drainage system, in a vessel with no partner to take the overflow, would have been far more dangerous, according to Dr. Geoffrey T. Manley, the vice chairman of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He is not involved in her care.

The fact that Mrs. Clinton had a blood clot in the past — in her leg, in 1998 — suggests that she may have a tendency to form clots, and may need blood-thinners long-term or even for the rest of her life, Dr. Manley said.

One major risk to people who take blood thinners is that the drugs increase bleeding, so blows to the head from falls or other accidents — like the fall that caused Mrs. Clinton’s concussion — become more dangerous, and more likely to cause a brain hemorrhage. Even so, the medication should not interfere with Mrs. Clinton’s career, Dr. Manley said.

“There are lots of people running around on anticoagulants today,” he said. “I don’t see any way it would have any long-term consequences.”

He also said there was no reason to think that this type of clot would recur; he said he had treated many patients for the same condition and had never seen one come back with it again.

Dr. Langer said the vein blocked by the clot might or might not reopen. Sometimes, he said, the clot persists and the body covers it with tissue that closes or narrows the blood vessel. As long as the vein on the other side of the head is open, there is no problem for the patient.

One thing that is unclear, and that may never be known for sure, is what caused Mrs. Clinton’s blood clot. Around the second week in December, she reportedly contracted a stomach virus that caused vomiting and dehydration, passed out, fell and struck her head. A concussion was diagnosed several days after the fall, on Dec. 13, and the public was told Sunday that she had a blood clot, though its location was not revealed until the next day.

She had several risk factors for clots, including dehydration and her previous history of a clot. In addition, women are more prone than men to this type of clot, particularly when dehydrated. The fall may also have been a factor, though it is not clear whether her head injury was serious enough to have caused a blood clot. The type of clot she had is far more likely to be associated with a skull fracture than with a concussion, several experts said.

Did overwork — frequent overseas trips, perpetual jet lag, high-pressure meetings — make her ill? Mrs. Clinton has kept up a punishing schedule since she declared her candidacy for president in 2007. Having logged more than 950,000 miles and visited 112 countries, she is one of the most-traveled secretaries of state in history. She has put on weight and in recent times appeared fatigued. But the same could be said of plenty of people who do not develop clots in their heads.

“You cannot tell me that her hard work resulted in this,” Dr. Langer said. “I can’t imagine that you could make that judgment.”

In theory, Dr. Manley said, exhaustion can weaken the immune system temporarily, and lower a person’s resistance to infections like the stomach virus that apparently started Mrs. Clinton’s problems. But in his opinion, the most important contributing factor to her blood clot was probably the head injury from her fall.

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Hillary Clinton Is Discharged From Hospital After Blood Clot

Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose globe-trotting tour as secretary of state was abruptly halted last month by a series of health problems, was discharged from a New York hospital on Wednesday evening after several days of treatment for a blood clot in a vein in her head.

The news of her release was the first welcome sign in a troubling month that grounded Mrs. Clinton — preventing her from answering questions in Congress about the State Department’s handling of the lethal attack on an American mission in Libya or being present when President Obama announced Senator John Kerry as his choice for her successor when she steps down as secretary of state.

“Her medical team advised her that she is making good progress on all fronts, and they are confident she will make a full recovery,” Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton, said in a statement.

Mrs. Clinton, 65, was admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital on Sunday after a scan discovered the blood clot. The scan was part of her follow-up care for a concussion she sustained more than two weeks earlier, when she fainted and fell, striking her head. According to the State Department, the fainting was caused by dehydration, brought on by a stomach virus. The concussion was diagnosed on Dec. 13, though the fall had occurred earlier that week.

The clot was potentially serious, blocking a vein that drains blood from the brain. Untreated, such blockages can lead to brain hemorrhages or strokes. Treatment consists mainly of blood thinners to keep the clot from enlarging and to prevent more clots from forming, and plenty of fluids to prevent dehydration, which is a major risk factor for blood clots.

Photographed leaving the hospital, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, appeared elated. In a Twitter post on Wednesday, Chelsea Clinton said, “Grateful my Mom discharged from the hospital & is heading home. Even more grateful her medical team confident she’ll make a full recovery.”

Dr. David J. Langer, a brain surgeon and associate professor at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, said that Mrs. Clinton would need close monitoring in the next days, weeks and months to make sure her doses of blood thinners are correct and that the clot is not growing. Dr. Langer is not involved in her care.

Mrs. Clinton’s illness cuts short what would have been a victory lap for her at the State Department. With only a few weeks before the end of President Obama’s first term — the time frame she set for her own departure — she will be able to do little more than say goodbye to her troops.

But she will, at least theoretically, be able to testify before the Senate and House about the attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. She was not able to appear at a hearing in December because of her illness. Republicans, who have sharply criticized the Obama administration’s handling of the attack and its aftermath, had demanded that she appear to explain the department’s role, though in recent days they have modulated their request.

Mrs. Clinton’s blood clot formed in a large vein along the side of her head, behind her right ear, between the brain and the skull. The vein, called the right transverse sinus, has a matching vessel on the left side. These veins drain blood from the brain; blockages can cause strokes or brain hemorrhages. But if only one transverse sinus is blocked, the vein on other side can usually handle the extra flow.

In one sense, Mrs. Clinton was lucky: a clot higher in this drainage system, in a vessel with no partner to take the overflow, would have been far more dangerous, according to Dr. Geoffrey T. Manley, the vice chairman of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He is not involved in her care.

The fact that Mrs. Clinton had a blood clot in the past — in her leg, in 1998 — suggests that she may have a tendency to form clots, and may need blood-thinners long-term or even for the rest of her life, Dr. Manley said.

One major risk to people who take blood thinners is that the drugs increase bleeding, so blows to the head from falls or other accidents — like the fall that caused Mrs. Clinton’s concussion — become more dangerous, and more likely to cause a brain hemorrhage. Even so, the medication should not interfere with Mrs. Clinton’s career, Dr. Manley said.

“There are lots of people running around on anticoagulants today,” he said. “I don’t see any way it would have any long-term consequences.”

He also said there was no reason to think that this type of clot would recur; he said he had treated many patients for the same condition and had never seen one come back with it again.

Dr. Langer said the vein blocked by the clot might or might not reopen. Sometimes, he said, the clot persists and the body covers it with tissue that closes or narrows the blood vessel. As long as the vein on the other side of the head is open, there is no problem for the patient.

One thing that is unclear, and that may never be known for sure, is what caused Mrs. Clinton’s blood clot. Around the second week in December, she reportedly contracted a stomach virus that caused vomiting and dehydration, passed out, fell and struck her head. A concussion was diagnosed several days after the fall, on Dec. 13, and the public was told Sunday that she had a blood clot, though its location was not revealed until the next day.

She had several risk factors for clots, including dehydration and her previous history of a clot. In addition, women are more prone than men to this type of clot, particularly when dehydrated. The fall may also have been a factor, though it is not clear whether her head injury was serious enough to have caused a blood clot. The type of clot she had is far more likely to be associated with a skull fracture than with a concussion, several experts said.

Did overwork — frequent overseas trips, perpetual jet lag, high-pressure meetings — make her ill? Mrs. Clinton has kept up a punishing schedule since she declared her candidacy for president in 2007. Having logged more than 950,000 miles and visited 112 countries, she is one of the most-traveled secretaries of state in history. She has put on weight and in recent times appeared fatigued. But the same could be said of plenty of people who do not develop clots in their heads.

“You cannot tell me that her hard work resulted in this,” Dr. Langer said. “I can’t imagine that you could make that judgment.”

In theory, Dr. Manley said, exhaustion can weaken the immune system temporarily, and lower a person’s resistance to infections like the stomach virus that apparently started Mrs. Clinton’s problems. But in his opinion, the most important contributing factor to her blood clot was probably the head injury from her fall.

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Bits: Publishing Without Perishing

In the old days, life for small publishers was a hassle. The economics were such that copies got dramatically cheaper when printed in bulk, but then the books had to be stored, which was expensive. Finding an audience was the hardest part; some independent presses took years or even decades to sell out a modest print run.

Now books can be efficiently printed in small quantities, like one copy. Amazon, meanwhile, is happy to do the job of fulfilling orders. The stage is set to allow everyone to become his own Alfred Knopf.

James Morrison, a 36-year-old editor and graphic designer in Adelaide, Australia, is an old-fashioned book enthusiast, with around 10,000 books in his personal library. In 2007 he began a blog, Caustic Cover Critic: One Man’s Endless Ranting About Book Design, which showcases and evaluates new jackets. Like any inveterate reader, Mr. Morrison would stumble across obscure books practically begging to be reprinted. For instance, he read an account by the historian David S. Reynolds of “the largest monster in antebellum literature,” which was “the kraken depicted in Eugene Batchelder’s ‘Romance of the Sea-Serpent, or The Ichthyosaurus,’ a bizarre narrative poem about a sea serpent that terrorizes the coast of Massachusetts, destroys a huge ship in mid-ocean, repasts on human remains gruesomely with sharks and whales, attends a Harvard commencement (where he has been asked to speak), [and] shocks partygoers by appearing at a Newport ball.”

Mr. Morrison concluded that “the audience for an 1850 book-length Monty Python-style doggerel poem about a socially aspirant sea serpent is probably just me,” but how could he be sure? The Internet is all about weaving people together with even stranger tastes.

The critic has published about a dozen out-of-copyright volumes using Lulu, which does the printing, and Amazon, which does the selling and shipping. He dubbed his venture Whisky Priest in homage to Graham Greene, himself an enthusiast of uncommon and unjustly forgotten literary efforts. On the Whisky Priest list are the Batchelder book; a collection by Edith Wharton; “Artists’ Wives,” Alphonse Daudet’s stories about the war between the sexes; and Storm Jameson’s “In the Second Year,” a prophetic look at fascism.

At a moment when predictions of the demise of print are omnipresent, Whisky Priest seemed an indication that the future might be more complex than anticipated. Mr. Morrison answered some questions by email. What follows is an edited extract.

Q. Will the ultimate pleasure for lovers of the printed book be your own editions of your favorite out-of-copyright books?

A. For me it was a matter of there being books in the public domain that I wanted to read which were either not available as physical books, or were available only in staggeringly ugly and expensive editions. I originally intended to just design a cover I liked and then print a copy for myself to read, but it turned out to be an almost negligible amount of extra effort to make them available for others to buy as well, so I thought I might as well do so. It would be as easy to produce editions of things like “Moby-Dick” or “Pride and Prejudice,” but there are already hundreds of versions of those, some with fantastic cover designs, so it would be a bit pointless.

Q. How easy would it be for others to become a publisher the way you did?

A. It’s very easy indeed, assuming you have some basic layout or design skills. Even without those you could still do it, though the book would probably not be so appealing. I’d certainly recommend it for people who, unsatisfied with the available editions, wanted a book they enjoyed having around the house. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way of making money. I’ve spent slightly more on proof copies, etc., than I’ve earned through royalties. Partly this is because I try to set the book prices as low as possible (I make about $1 a book through Amazon, and a little more if someone buys the books direct from Lulu), since they’re: a) books usually available free or cheaply in electronic form, and b) Print on Demand books, which are not quite as nice to hold and handle as conventionally published books, so it seems unfair to charge more for them.

Q. I was struck by how little capital you needed.

A. Lulu and Amazon take a cut of each copy sold but require no up-front listing fees or anything like that. The only money I spend is on ordering proof copies for myself, which is the production cost without anything else added on — about $8 for one recent title. To make a book available on Amazon, you need to order at least one physical copy yourself, check it, and then let Lulu know it’s OK to go ahead and list it. If you just wanted to list on Lulu’s own site, you don’t even need to do that — you could upload a thousand different books and make them available for sale via the Lulu site without ever spending a cent (though you’d never know what they looked like as physical books, of course).

Q. How have the books done?

A. Not vast numbers. The most popular has sold 27 copies. That, a little surprisingly, is A. P. Herbert’s “The Secret Battle”: it’s a very good novel by a once-popular and now nearly forgotten English writer, based on his World War I experiences, and about the way the English army would execute its own men for cowardice. Close behind are “Transfiguration,” a pair of novellas and some nonfiction by the great Austrian writer and suicide Stefan Zweig, and “The Dangerous Age,” a classic feminist Danish novella by Karin MichaÎlis. But then there are some which have done surprisingly poorly. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s play “The Vegetable,” the only edition currently in print, has sold only two copies. But then I can’t sell that in the U.S., where it’s still in copyright, and that’s probably where the main market for a parody on Warren Harding’s presidency is likely to be found. Thinking over that sentence, maybe it’s a surprise I’ve sold any copies at all.

Q. Who sets the prices?

A. The pricing is under my control, to a point. Basically, Lulu tells you the absolute minimum you can charge, which covers the production costs and their profit, and then you add to that whatever you want. For example, the Stefan Zweig production cost is $8.10 and then Lulu add a little to that to create the absolute lowest price, which is the lowest I could charge and still make them a little profit (they take 20 percent of any profit on physical books, or 10 percent for ebooks) — in this case around $9. I sell it for $11.95, from which Amazon then takes a little over $3 (some of this may also go to Lulu or some other third party — Amazon doesn’t disclose that), and I get 69 cents. If someone decided to buy the book from Lulu, which is less likely since they have to pay for postage and so on, I make $3.08 (and Lulu gets 77 cents); however, almost every sale comes via Amazon. But I could set the price at anything above that base cost of $8.10, like $25 or even $250, if I thought anyone was mad enough to pay it, and most of that inflated cost would come to me.

Q. How much have you invested in this overall and how much has it brought you?

A. I’ve only earned a few hundred dollars over two years, and have probably spent about $200 to do that, so I’m slightly ahead, but it’s no way to make a living. Partly this is my own fault — I have no interest in marketing or networking, so I just publish the books and let them do their thing.

Q. Are others doing this?

A. To my surprise, I don’t know of anyone doing things in quite the same way as I am. Most publishers of Print on Demand classics seem to operate on a different scale: they make thousands of titles available, usually with identical covers and at eye-watering prices, or else they just sell them as ebooks. I suspect it’s a matter of poor timing, technologically: the ability to print a whole physical book cheaply but at a decent quality has become available to everyone just at the same time as ebooks have started wreaking havoc with the market. It’s a niche thing, I suspect, but I’m happy enough in that niche.

Q. I think this is just beginning. I envision a future where we will all have competing Stefan Zweig lines.

A. I hope this is the way it pans out.

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Murder Charges Are Filed Against 5 Men in New Delhi Gang Rape

Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Indian lawyers protested on Thursday outside a court in New Delhi where charges were filed in a gang rape case.

NEW DELHI — Rape, murder and other charges were filed on Thursday against five men suspected of carrying out the gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student who later died of her injuries in a case that has prompted outrage and protests across India.

A court official announced that beyond rape and murder, the charges include destruction of evidence and the attempted murder of the woman’s companion, a list of crimes that could result in the rare imposition of the death penalty. A court official said the charges would be made public on Saturday. A sixth suspect is a juvenile and will have his case handled separately for now.

The case against the five men will be referred almost immediately to a new fast-track court set up in recent days to handle cases involving crimes against women, officials said. That court is expected to hold a trial soon in stark contrast to the apathy and years of delay that Indian rape victims often face when seeking justice.

The five are accused of luring the woman and her boyfriend onto a bus in South Delhi, beating them and abusing her so brutally with a metal rod during the rape that she sustained fatal internal injuries. The woman clung to life for two weeks but died on Saturday in a Singapore hospital, where she had been transferred for special care.

Gang rapes have become almost routine in India, a country that some surveys suggest has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. Rape complaints increased 25 percent between 2006 and 2011, although it is impossible to know whether this represents a real increase in crime or simply an increased willingness by victims to file charges and by the police to accept them.

But something about the recent crime caught the public’s attention. Among the reasons could be the randomness of the crime (most rape victims know their abusers), its brutality and the sympathetic profile of the victim.

The outpouring of anger at the crime caught the government by surprise, and there has been widespread criticism of its aggressive response to protesters, which included tear gas, water cannons and beatings by truncheon-wielding riot police officers. The government invoked a terrorism law that prohibits even small gatherings and it closed a huge portion of the capital to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which represented a punishing loss to businesses in the area.

The government’s reaction fed longtime criticism that India’s police are too often used to guard the powerful from the people rather than to protect the people from predators. India’s police are generally poorly trained, deeply corrupt and often viewed by women as predators rather than protectors — one reason that laws forbid officers from arresting a woman or even bringing her to a police station for questioning during nighttime hours.

The case has also led to a continuing discussion about the conflict between the aspirations of India’s rising middle class and a deeply conservative and patriarchal culture that views the recent educational and economic successes of Indian women with unease and even alarm. An estimated 25,000 women are murdered each year by families who view their choice of mate as inappropriate, and Indian newspapers and television news programs now feature almost daily stories about new rape cases.

Kishwar Desai, an author, wrote an opinion article in The Indian Express on Thursday that said the gang rape illustrated to some that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the work force. The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.”

Because of the intense interest prompted by the case, a vast scrum of TV cameras and reporters jostled inside and outside of the courthouse for much of Thursday. And with officials refusing to provide routine information about whether the suspects would arrive at the courthouse, rumors about the day’s events ricocheted around the media scrum like a drop of water on a hot frying pan.

Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 3, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article erroneously reported that the charges had been filed earlier on Thursday.

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Markets Jump on Fiscal Deal

Global stocks kicked off the 2013 trading year with a strong start Wednesday, as investors welcomed a deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans that ended, at least temporarily, an impasse over fiscal policy that had threatened chaos in the new year.

The broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index leapt 2.1 percent at the start of trading. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 1.8 percent, or about 236 points, and the Nasdaq composite index climbed 2.7 percent.

The deadline drama over the fiscal impasse ended when a sufficient number of Republicans in the House of Representatives joined Democrats to back a deal the Senate had reached earlier. The deal modestly raises income taxes on the highest-earning Americans, ends payroll tax cuts and creates permanent tax cuts for others.

“There’s clearly a big relief rally,” said Christian Schulz, an economist in London with Berenberg Bank.

The Euro Stoxx 50 index of euro zone blue chips rose 2.6 percent in afternoon trading, while the FTSE 100 index in London gained 2.3 percent. The euro gained 0.6 percent to $1.3270, and yields fell on Spanish and Italian government bonds.

Asian indexes also gained, with the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong rising 2.9 percent. But markets in Japan and mainland China were closed for holidays.

Still, analysts warned that the gains might not last, as the last-minute deal had only bought time.

The deal “is likely to prove only a temporary fix to address fiscal uncertainty in the U.S.,” Lee Hardman, an analyst at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in London, wrote in a research note, pointing out that “the planned sequester government spending cuts merely delayed for two months.”

Investors, he added, probably will begin to focus on “whether U.S. politicians will be able to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months to avert a technical default, and whether the delayed sequester spending cuts will now come into force on March 1.”

Mr. Schultz noted that the United States hit the debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion, or 104 percent of 2012 gross domestic product, on Dec. 31, and could it exceed it as soon as February without Congressional action.

There are also questions about how America’s new commitment to cutting the deficit will affect the economy and its credit ratings.

“The austerity they’ve imposed is very modest,” Mr. Schultz said, “perhaps 1 percent of G.D.P. So maybe the most interesting thing will be to see how the ratings agencies react.”

Analysts at DBS in Singapore wrote in a research note: “Call it breathing room, call it kicking the can down the road, call it whatever you like — come mid-February, when the decision on the legal U.S. debt limit will be needed, the fight starts afresh.”

They added, “Two more months of shenanigans and waffling/seasick markets? It certainly looks that way.”

The stock market gains in Europe came despite indications that the region’s manufacturing activity remains in the doldrums. Surveys of purchasing managers by Markit Economics showed euro zone factories ended 2012 in poor shape, with both production and new orders declining in December. German factories posted declines in both output and new orders, according to the Markit data, while the Spanish manufacturing shrank a 20th consecutive month, with both the decline and the pace of job cuts accelerating.

David Jolly reported from Paris. Bettina Wassener reported from Hong Kong.

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Well: Good and Bad, the Little Things Add Up in Fitness

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The past year in fitness has been alternately inspiring, vexing and diverting, as my revisiting of all of the Phys Ed columns published in 2012 makes clear. Taken as a whole, the latest exercise-related science tells us that the right types and amounts of exercise will almost certainly lengthen your life, strengthen your brain, affect your waistline and even clear debris from inside your body’s cells. But too much exercise, other 2012 science intimates, might have undesirable effects on your heart, while popping painkillers, donning stilettos and sitting and reading this column likewise have their costs.

With New Year’s exercise resolutions still fresh and hopefully unbroken on this, day two of 2013, it now seems like the perfect time to review these and other lessons of the past year in fitness science.

First, since I am habitually both overscheduled and indolent, I was delighted to report, as I did in June, that the “sweet sport” for health benefits seems to come from jogging or moderately working out for only a brief period a few times a week.

Specifically, an encouraging 2012 study of 52,656 American adults found that those who ran 1 to 20 miles per week at an average pace of about 10 or 11 minutes per mile — my leisurely jogging speed, in fact — lived longer, on average, than sedentary adults. They also lived longer than the group (admittedly small) who ran more than 20 miles per week.

“These data certainly support the idea that more running is not needed to produce extra health and mortality benefits,” Dr. Carl J. Lavie, a cardiologist in New Orleans and co-author of the study told me. “If anything,” he said, “it appears that less running is associated with the best protection from mortality risk.”

Similarly, in a study from Denmark that I wrote about in September, a group of pudgy young men lost more weight after 13 weeks of exercising moderately for about 30 minutes several times a week than a separate group who worked out twice as much.

The men who exercised the most, the study authors discovered, also subsequently ate more than the moderate exercisers.

Even more striking, however, the vigorous exercisers subsequently sat around more each day than did the men who had exercised less, motion sensors worn by all of the volunteers showed.

“They were fatigued,” said Mads Rosenkilde, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Copenhagen and the study’s co-author.

Meanwhile, the men who had worked out for only about 30 minutes seemed to be energized by their new routines. They stood up, walked, stretched and even bounced in place more than they once had. “It looks like they were taking the stairs now, not the elevators, and just moving around more,” Mr. Rosenkilde said. “It was little things, but they add up.”

And that idea was, in fact, perhaps the most dominant exercise-science theme of 2012: that little things add up, with both positive and pernicious effects. Another of my favorite studies of 2012 found that a mere 10 minutes of physical activity increased life spans in adults by almost two years, even if the adults remained significantly overweight.

But the inverse of that finding proved to be equally true: not fitting periods of activity into a person’s daily life also affected life span. Perhaps the most chilling sentence that I wrote all year reported that, according to a large study of Western adults, “Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.”

I am watching much less television these days.

But not all of the new fitness science I covered this year was quite so sobering or, to be honest, consequential. Some of the more practical studies simply validated common sense, including reports that to succeed in ball sports, keep your eye on the ball; during hot-weather exercise, pour cold water over your head; and, finally, on the day before a marathon, eat a lot.

But when I think about the science that has most affected how I plan my life, I return again and again to those studies showing that physical activity alters how long and how well we live. My days of heedless youth are behind me. So I won’t soon forget the study I wrote about in September detailing how moderate, frequent physical activity in midlife can delay the onset of illness and frailty in old age. Exercise won’t prevent you from aging, of course. Only death does that. But this study and others from this year underscore that staying active, even in moderate doses, dramatically improves how your aging body feels and responds.

Aging also inspired my favorite reader comment of 2012, which was posted in response to a research scientist’s name. “‘Dr. Head,’” the reader wrote. “That shall be the name of my all-senior-citizen metal band,” which, if its members gyrate and vigorously bound about like Mick Jagger on his recent tour, should ensure themselves decades in which to robustly perform.

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