You can only buy Wolf Hall and other Macmillan books through third-party sellers at Amazon.com (click for full-size)
Sony's Reader Store still stocks Macmillan books, and for the controversial $9.99 price point (click for full size)
[UPDATE: Amazon gave in, and will sell Macmillan books via the "agency model" Macmillan laid out. Which means Macmillan ebooks will cost $13-$15, even at Amazon. I'm putting the over/under on the date of Amazon's next major Kindle screw-up at March 15.]
So Amazon has barred all Macmillan books (print and digital) from its U.S. website after the publisher insolently disagreed with Amazon’s stringent pricing policies. Macmillan asked for either a different pricing structure or “windowing,” i.e. delayed ebook releases (Macmillan CEO John Sargent claims Amazon will make more money, and Macmillan will make less under the new structure, which confuses me). Amazon responded with the Macmillan ban.
You can still find Macmillan books at the Sony Reader Store, however, and you can find many selling for the $9.99 price point that started all this. I’m assuming either higher Macmillan prices or windowing is coming to Sony, but at least you can buy the books.
For the record, I think the entire hardcover pricing system is greedy and predatory; it’s essentially publishers milking their biggest fans’ excitement to make a few extra bucks. I think Macmillan’s making a big mistake in trying to preserve hardcover pricing, and refusing to fully embrace ebooks.
However, this Amazon move is thuggery of the first order, and it doesn’t feel like the stalemate will be resolved very quickly[UPDATE: Or maybe it will, what do I know] (or that it will be the last of its kind). The Macmillan ban combined with Amazon’s continued refusal to allow library ebooks on the Kindle makes one thing clear: Kindle is simply not the best ereader for book readers. If you read mostly books, get a Sony Reader or an Astak Pocket Pro. If you read mostly newspapers or magazines, get an iPad. [UPDATE: Amazon's cave-in brings the Kindle back to the realm of relevancy for book readers. But it still comes with too many questionable corporate decisions for my taste.]
Quick item here. Lauren Conrad is a reality star or something. She’s (ghost-)written two novels, both about being a reality star (the second, pictured, comes out Tuesday).
So Lauren Conrad talked to Entertainment Weekly about books (I’m surprised that sentence didn’t cause a black hole). Good news: the discussion is as vapid and pointless—and as absurdly funny—as you might expect.
My favorite part is when she calls The Great Gatsby “a fun story.”
No, wait, it’s when she says she likes Chelsea Handler’s books because “it was like she was telling the story herself.”
Wait, my real favorite is when she says the fictional character she identifies with most is Jane from her own books, “because she is me.” Whaaaa?
Hi everyone. So we’ve been at it a year and we’re still going strong. As a matter of fact, judging by our stats, we’re going much stronger than we expected when we started this whole shebang. Thanks a lot to all our readers for sticking with us, and welcome to all the new readers who join us in 2010. We’re planning a lot of change for the coming year, and our birthday seemed like as good a day as any to share with you all what we’re getting up to.
The state of things to come
When we started this site, we had two goals in mind: to help sort out ereading news, trends, and pitfalls for casual users; and to share book reviews and reader-centric book commentary. We wanted to establish a site for reader advocacy, where books (no matter how they are consumed) are thought of as art and entertainment, and not as a sales vessel. We’ve passed up making money and getting free stuff in order to remain unbiased for our readers. We think we’ve been quite successful in this.
When we started the ereader portion of this site, it was largely because we couldn’t find a good entry point into digital reading. At the time, we were ereader novices ourselves, and useful information on ereaders was fragmented, confusing, and spread out all over the place. Just a year later, we’ve learned a lot, and the landscape of digital reading has certainly changed a lot.
Not only is everybody following ereaders, but it seems everybody is making them too. There are so many (most with ridiculous names and more or less the same feature set) that we can’t keep up with them all in-depth, and, frankly, most don’t warrant the attention.
We’re revising our ereader comparison to guide you toward our picks for best ereader in several categories (best book ereader, best magazine ereader, etc.), and we’ll provide links to a few other devices, but we’ll no longer be maintaining a comprehensive listing of every ereader available. If you want full coverage, try TeleRead or Mobileread; both are excellent, comprehensive sites for ebook fiends who can’t get enough ereader news. We will continue to share book and ebook news for more casual fans through our Wednesday links, however as of February they’ll be posted every second Wednesday.
Additions for 2010
In the coming year, we’ll be moving toward more book coverage. We’ll still weigh in on ereader issues when major ones come up, but we won’t be linking to every unboxing of every ereader that comes down the pipe. Instead we’ll be focusing on book reviews, and opinions about books and book trends (not necessarily publishing trends, except from a reader’s perspective).
You can expect to see some smaller, more casual posts that will focus on more minor and eclectic opinions and observations. Sometimes posts will be frequent, sometimes not. We’ll be posting more reviews, and seeking more reviews from our readers and from outside authors. We’ll be doing more themed series, not unlike our holiday posts or recent Best Books of 2009 and Literary Beach Books series. (In fact, this will be beginning in mid-February with our new, Drop Everything and Read This Book series–title subject to change.)
We’re also starting a category called Essays, where we’ll post longer, more in-depth thoughts on topics ranging from books to copyright laws, reading habits to technology preferences, and so on.
On the sidebar to the right, you will soon see a post handpicked each week to be highlighted with a sticky link. Sometimes this will be a post garnering a lot of discussion, other times it will be one our editors find relevant to something currently happening in the world, or just something from the archive we want to bring up for air.
The books reviews will be getting a home in the form of an archive page where reviews can be browsed by author and title (you can already filter by genre in our nav bar, or search for names or titles in the search box).
You may also have noticed that we have phased out the “Best ebook deal” line on our reviews, due to the general streamline of prices and formats in recent months. Check out our revamped The Best Ways to Get eBooks page for a guide on getting great deals yourself.
And finally, perhaps what excites us most is that we are finally making tangible steps towards launching our long-teased magazine. Every few weeks, we’ll feature a story, poem, essay, or other piece of creative writing, filed under “Creative Work” in the “Back Page” section. Eventually these will be compiled in the first issue of the Chamber Four magazine. We are also hard at work compiling an anthology of already published fiction from around the internet. We’ll certainly share more on this later, but we wanted to finally announce it.
As always, come back and read us, subscribe to our feed, comment, print, and share. Better yet, write us a review or an essay. And if you have a friend who might be interested in doing so, send them our url. We see C4 as a platform from which readers can speak, so we invite any and all to speak up. Thanks again for a wonderful year, we’re looking forward to an even better one in twenty-ten.
Amazon’s really hyping Kindle books in the wake of an iPad that (maybe) doesn’t have proprietary formatting [UPDATE: iPad does indeed have proprietary formatting. Take a breath, Kindle]. Still… Henry Paulson? You know exactly what’s in this book (this), and you know it’s not going to be all that riveting. So who’s staying up until midnight on Sunday to get themselves the newest Hank? I doubt even Paulson himself will.
Maybe Amazon has a rogue algorithm that gives anything looking vaguely like “Harry Potter” its own midnight release party. T-minus 82 hours!
Hopefully this ad stays front and center on Amazon’s homepage for all 82 of them.
[UPDATE: It's confirmed that the iPad won't be compatible with Adobe ePub books. That means no library books, and it takes a lot of the shine off the new iBooks. For some reason, Apple hates Adobe, and Adobe hates them back.]
Today, Apple unveiled their new tablet computer, the “iPad,” (Gizmodo’s full coverage here) and made the QUE entirely irrelevant. The iPad is cheaper ($500 WiFi/$630 3G), faster, and more functional than the QUE, and it will actually be available earlier.
Not only does the iPad have a new, Apple-branded ereading program (iBooks), it can do video, internet, maps, and everything else that an iPhone can, on a grander scale. The only advantages the QUE has left are its ability to hand-write notes, and its E-Ink screen which makes for less eye strain and longer battery life. Still, the iPad has ten hours of battery life, so that last point is moot.
Basically, this spells doom for the $650 QUE, and if you were thinking about getting the Alex for $400 $360, or (God forbid) a $490 Kindle DX, how can you not scrape up a little extra for an iPad instead?
The iPad’s debut highlights the folly of “luxury” ereaders like the QUE and the Alex, which have gone in the wrong direction, trying to have an ereader that’s half laptop, with a price tag to match. Simple, affordable ereaders like the Kindle, Astak Pocket Pro, and Sony Pocket Edition are the only ones worth looking at now, at least until the Alex’s price drops by $150.
A few more tidbits, and links to more iPad coverage, after the jump. … Continue reading »
Basically, nobody wants to shut up about the new Apple tablet (supposedlydubbed the iPad–consider it nominated for this week’s dumbest new ereader name award). It’s slated to be revealed today, so I’m not going to bother parsing out the rumors. This one bit about pricing strategies and the coming battle between Apple and Amazon is interesting though. Not sure where B&N is in all this. I guess they probably shouldn’t have f-ed up the Nook launch so badly. Perhaps they are waiting for a boost from Apple? If you’re foolishish enough to get a first generation iPad (thus ignoring Apple’s track record of vastly superior second gen devices), here are some other fun uses for it.
Amazon has quietly laxed their DRM policies. So quietly that hardly anyone has noticed. In what could be an enourmous shift, Apple will allow iTunes users to store libraries in the cloud, rather than their harddrives (hopefully it doesn’t require a .Mac subscription). Besides fighting with China, Google is also in a tiff with its old buddy Apple. This may lead to Apple dumping Google integration from their devices and adopting Bing, which is of course owned by–Mac geeks are fainting left and right over this, I’m sure–the evil Microsoft. Regardless of Google’s early success (maybe) with Android’s apps, Apple is still the undisputed ruler of App-land.
It’s kinda old news, but apparently colleges are being sued for using ereaders in classrooms because blind students can’t use them. How using a braille edition to supplement a Kindle (which reads books–poorly–out loud) is less fair than if the other students use deadtree, I do not understand. It won’t help the blind, but if you’ve no backlight on your ereader and can’t figure out how to turn on your lamp, try this dongle. This Boogie Board doodle toy isn’t an ereader (and probably isn’t much use to anyone not a basketball coach) but it does seem pretty cool, and uses no power at that.
We’ll be posting on Friday about some of the many changes we have planned for our second year. There’s a lot of good stuff planned, and we’ll be getting bigger and better as time goes on. Check back Friday for that.
Here’s a quick weird thing. Martin Amis (60) and Joan Brady (70), a couple of old authors, somehow got in a spat about euthanasia, despite both supporting it.
It happened like this. Amis laid out his pro-euthanasia views—inspired by proximity to the ugly, protracted death of his stepfather—in an interview in the Sunday Times. Step two: the Times reported on its own interview here.
Then, Brady got in a snit and took Amis to task in the Guardian with this editorial, in which she says people should not be forcibly killed (that’s not what Amis said, but she linked to the Times‘s self-reportage, so presumably she didn’t read the actual interview).
The Guardian‘s book blog then simultaneously (check the timestamp) published this self-reportage of Brady’s editorial, in which they quote Brady saying she’s pro-euthanasia (which she didn’t say in the editorial) because of her proximity to the ugly, protracted death of her husband. Scoop!
Still with me? Once more, with alacrity: Amis says he’s pro-euthanasia in the Times, the Times quotes him in a filler piece about their own article, Brady reads the filler piece, rails against Amis in the Guardian, the Guardian runs filler piece about their own article, saying Brady is pro-euthanasia.
For those keeping score, that’s FOUR articles, ONE manufactured scandal, and ZERO stories of any substance whatsoever. [EDIT: OK, that's not quite fair. The original interview was pretty good, and covered a lot more than this one euthanasia thing. But the Times tried to cancel that out by playing up a couple of lines for controversy's sake.] Welcome to modern newspapership!
In Soon I Will Be Invincible, the world’s greatest villain, Dr. Impossible, has once again escaped from prison and the diabolical genius is about to embark on his latest scheme to take over the world. As usual, standing in his way is a league of superheroes, in this case the Champions. Nothing terribly original so far, right? Wrong.
Austin Grossman does nothing short of re-invigorate the superhero story and takes great strides in legitimizing the comics genre as a subject worthy of literary pursuit. Grossman greatest achievement is adding depth and richness to his characters in an arena where characters are usually reduced to superficial props that set a stage for epic battles and the showcasing of ludicrous powers. As is evident in the title of the book, and the chapter titles within, such as “Riddle Me This,” “Welcome to My Island”, and “But Before I Kill You”, there is a good deal of playfulness and send-up at work, but Grossman’s use of comic book clichés is more an act of celebration rather than of subversion. … Continue reading »
Tinkers is an extremely well written book. Its sentences and paragraphs are beautiful and precise, and a pleasure to read.
The plot and story of it, though, don’t stand out the way the language does. Tinkers is an excellent book to read slowly and savor, like a book of poetry. It’s not one to plow through in a day, and it’s not a page-turner that will keep you up late; however, it’s definitely worth the time.
