|
|
by Nico Vreeland, on March 10th, 2010
 What do these three have in common? They all have absolutely no business writing or "writing" books. News about books and ebooks from around the web:
- Vapidity will continue to rule the bestseller list. Sarah Palin plans to “write” another book (get ready, Marcos), Lindsay Lohan has plans to hawk her crazed mutterings, and Hilary Duff just signed a contract to write a series of young-adult Da Vinci Code-style caper novels (I kid you not). Previously, we learned about reality star Lauren Conrad, who’s writing novels (plural) despite having never read a whole book in her life (which you should do, if you want to write one). Then there’s always Dan Brown, a terrible writer of stupid books (even his website wants to be a movie)… but he has 80,000,000 readers. And let’s never forget Douglas Preston, a horrible writer who’s so overprivileged and out of touch that he attacked his own readers for not paying exorbitant prices for his crappy books. Please help me solve this. If you like any of those writers, do me a personal favor: stop buying their books and watch TV instead. TV does mindless entertainment much better than books, and then books can go back to being carefully crafted works of the imagination, and not just paycheck tickets cranked out by illiterate uncaring morons and vapid celebrities trying to cash in on their fleeting fame. Publishing industry: I hate you. To wrap up this rant, here is a grossly unreadable article about nothing, written by an editor from Knopf. It’s a joke, right? Nobody’s that bad a writer, especially not a professional editor, right? Right?
- Borders is broke and starting heavy layoffs. Three months ago, while discussing the Nook, I noticed that Borders notably had no plans to release its own ereader/ebookstore. I said this about it: “Oh, and also… remember Borders? I’d say they have about 2 years of financial solvency left. It’s going to be like a brontosaurus dying.” Based on my understanding of the financial gobbledygook in the article in that first link, that timeline was just slightly generous. Ebooks are the way of the future, bookstores. Don’t be shy.
- Two weeks ago, the NY Times published this article by Motoko Rich about the prices of ebooks vs. paper books. It included this chart, which got everybody in a huff because it claimed that ebooks selling for as low as $9.99 will provide as much profit to publishers (not authors) as full-price, $26 hardcover books. Among the respondents: Gizmodo, GalleyCat, John August, and almost everybody else in the world. I just have one thing to add. Rich estimates the costs of printing and shipping at $3.25. Since online hardcover prices max out at about $15, that means, logically, ebook prices should max out at about $12. Since some new, hardcover, guaranteed bestsellers go for even less (like Stieg Larsson’s next one, pre-selling at Amazon for $11.50), ebook editions of those should come in at sub-$10. Which means maybe readers asking for $9.99 ebooks wasn’t so astonishingly entitled after all. Maybe the Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle lost Macmillan more than it gained them. Maybe publishers should shut up about prices and windowing and all those other caveats, and just put their weight behind ebooks. Stop treating your customers like enemies, and maybe everything will turn out OK.
by Sean Clark, on February 26th, 2010
It was a short month, but there were plenty of reviews to haikuify.
.
Dracula sequel?
better than I would have guessed
this was not Twilight
.
isn’t too unique
good read if you’re up for it
at least it is fun
.
vapid and trite trash
paper dolls could emote more
books should welcome thought
.
Marcos gets ranty
but he kept his points valid
ha! moose excrement
.
Stone’s best writing is
all about the dalliance
too bad he needs plot
.
Nico: not impressed
ending fizzles out badly
won’t get an Edgar
.
top-notch history
comprehensive as all heck
Pagden spins a yarn
.
Malcom X and Reap
led off our months-long series
oh, what will come next?
.
by Sean Clark, on February 24th, 2010
by Nico Vreeland, on February 23rd, 2010
 Douglas Preston is a jerk and an author who gets his jollies by viciously insulting his readers, and then continuing to insult them.
I’ve ranted twice about Preston in the past two weeks, and I’ve called him a hack more than once. I wanted to see just how good or bad a writer he is, so I borrowed one of his ebooks (Riptide) from the library. Turns out he’s pretty bad, and I’m going to show you exactly why. This probably won’t be the last time I make fun of Preston, but considering he still hasn’t apologized for insulting his readers (and pretty much all readers of ebooks), he’s got some insults coming his own way.
The point of this isn’t (just) to mock Preston because he’s a hypocritical, self-righteous blowhard who’s trying to exploit his readers instead of appreciating them. It’s also to put the lie to Preston’s comments about how readers don’t want to pay “the real price” for his books. Going by these passages, his readers are, in fact, significantly overpaying.
(This book, and most of Preston’s, are co-written by Lincoln Child, who didn’t insult his own readers. But he did sign off on this insultingly condescending open letter, so he’s guilty of at least aiding and abetting.)
Let’s have some fun.
…
Continue reading »
by Nico Vreeland, on February 23rd, 2010
 Douglas Preston: Still a jerk, now a much more careful jerk An arrogant hack author named Douglas Preston appeared in a New York Times article two weeks ago, wherein he said that readers who wanted ebook editions of his book (and wanted them for less than the cost of the hardcover) were astonishingly entitled and, quite literally, he accused them of making America unhealthy.
So. That ticked some people off—including me. Two weeks later, Preston has realized that maybe he shouldn’t run around insulting his customers, and he has now offered up a half-assed backpedal (via), in which he attempts to mollify his readers with about half a Hallmark card’s worth of affection. He succeeds, however, only in proving he thinks his readers are stupid enough to believe his obvious lies.
Chris Meadows at TeleRead debunks Preston’s turnaround pretty thoroughly. I just want to add a couple of “how stupid does he think we are?” points about both the statement and his other new comments:
- Preston never apologizes. He should apologize.
- Preston says he wants to make money for Wal-Mart. In his original comments, he said “the Wal-Mart mentality…is very unhealthy for our country.” Is this a joke?
- He says he has no control over pricing or windowing (the practice of delaying ebook releases to force people to buy hardcovers), then says he supports windowing. He uses movies as an example of windowing, but fails to mention that movies in a theater offer more value and a different experience than DVDs, while hardcover vs. ebook editions of books offer exactly the same experience (and the people who disagree can still buy the hardcover).
- In his statement, he says, “We want to write the best books we can.” Uh, no. If that was true, you’d spend longer than 9 months apiece on them.
- He says he wants his “publishers to make [his books] available to you in the format in which you prefer to read them.” Come on, Preston, you’re not even trying.
- And, of course, the ultimate lie: “From our perspective, the most important element in all this is you, the reader.” What does it mean when my BS detector shrieks and then melts?
Look, Preston, here’s the thing: you write books because they make you money. You hate ebooks because you think you’ll make less money on them. You hate your readers because they want ebooks, and because they don’t like being bossed around, or being told they’re stupid and greedy.
You grudgingly crapped out this… this statement, whatever it is (not an apology), in which you transparently lie and say you like your readers. Hopefully, it’s not fooling anybody, but TechDirt put this news in the “good-for-him dept,” so you got at least one. Basically, you’re a jerk. But now you’re being slightly more diplomatic about it.
Listen, you owe your readers nothing less than a debt of immense gratitude, especially if they’ve allowed you to write full-time and make a decent living at it. You should be fighting your publisher to give your readers what they want. They don’t want free books, and they don’t want to rip you off. They just want a fair deal, and when you call that “entitlement,” you should come crawling back on your knees and beg for their forgiveness. Instead you throw this sloppy mess of platitudes at them. It makes me furious, and I’ve never given you a dime.
OK, deep breaths.
The person I really feel sorry for is Lincoln Child, Preston’s writing partner, who hasn’t said anything stupid about this. But then, he’s worked with this colossal jerk for years, so… I guess he’s not entirely innocent.
by Nico Vreeland, on February 18th, 2010
 J.K. Rowling Not really a full links post, but a few things caught my eye this morning. So here we go.
First of all, J.K. Rowling has been sued for plagiarism, again, hilariously. This time the plaintiff is the estate of a writer who died thirteen years ago. They claim she stole from a 36-page pamphlet called “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard.”
The entire case rests not on copied passages, but on the fact that “both Willy and Harry [are] required to solve a task as part of a contest, which they achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers.”
So, your case rests on the word “bathroom.” Good luck.
My other favorite line from that story is the estate’s PR guy (not lawyer) saying: “‘All of Willy the Wizard is in the Goblet of Fire.’” That’s a joke, right? Because “Willy” is only 36 pages long? Right?
And there’s a lot of other funny stuff in the Guardian piece. In other news:
- Engadget reports the new iRex ereader is finally coming out, only four months late. This new model, the cutely named DR800SG, is notable because it costs less than $800, and it gives Engadget a chance to backhand the stupid Nook by calling the iRex “Barnes & Noble’s first big play in the space.” Since it has a stylus-driven touchscreen, file it under Y for Yet another reason not to get a QUE.
- And, finally, The Rapture, one of my favorite bands, says this about their upcoming release:
“Our new album’s gonna be fucking 100 times better than the iPad,” [band member Gabe Andruzzi] jokes. “With this record you’re going to be interfacing with your soul in ways that have never happened before.”
So we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice.
by Nico Vreeland, on February 11th, 2010
Bestselling author and mean mean jerk Douglas Preston I just read this NY Times article (via) and I’m noticing a trend that’s really starting to infuriate me. It’s the use of the word “entitlement” by publishers and authors to describe their own customers.
In this article, author and complete jerk Douglas Preston is featured in this paragraph:
“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”
This kind of thing drives me absolutely insane. The ebook release of Preston’s book is delayed by four months because Preston and his publishers want their hardcover money. According to those publishers, Impact’s “real price” is $26. Speaking of entitlement.
But let’s see some peasants brandish pitchforks. Exactly what are the outrageously entitled Wal-Mart Americans saying? Here’s another paragraph from the article:
“I just don’t want to be extorted,” said Joshua Levitsky, a computer technician and Kindle owner in New York. “I want to pay what it’s worth. If it costs them nothing to print the paper book, which I can’t believe, then they should be the same price. But I just don’t see how it can be the same price.”
Hmm. That’s logical, sound, completely unentitled thinking. For years, publishers have been charging $20 or more for “hardcover” books, implying that some of that cost goes toward the actual production materials. Now, with ebooks, they’re trying to charge the same price for brand new ebooks as they charge for the outlandishly expensive hardcover editions.
The problem with this isn’t that customers are “entitled” to think they should get ebooks cheaper. The problem with this is that no publisher has yet advanced any logical explanation as to why the ebook editions SHOULDN’T be cheaper than the hardcovers. The burden of proof is on the publishers, and they haven’t convinced anybody.
Furthermore, it infuriates me when publishers think or believe that just because their pricing system has been a certain way in the past, that’s the way it should be forever. $26 is not the “real price” of a book. Dan Brown is not worth $26, Sarah Palin is not worth $26. And let’s face it, Douglas Preston isn’t worth $26. (You can just tell by his hair, can’t you?)
In reality, the hardcover of Impact goes for $14.29 at Amazon. If you want customers to pay more than $9.99 for the ebook edition, start by showing them a formula that goes something like this: [hardcover price] – [paper, ink, cardboard, and shipping costs] = [ebook price]. To sell a hardcover for $14 and then argue that the “real price” of the ebook version is up to $15… sheer madness.
Now, I do think publishers should be able to set their own prices. I also think Macmillan is incredibly stupid to raise their prices $5 per ebook. I hope it brings them to their knees. Fine, though, it’s up to them.
But when rich, bestselling hack authors (Preston’s crapped out more than a dozen novels in the past decade) start insulting their own readers, things are taking a wrong turn. It’s not readers’ “absolutely astonishing sense of entitlement” that makes us think technological advancement should bring down production costs, it’s basic common sense. And no matter how many times publishers say ebooks are expensive to make, it will never make sense to charge the same amount.
by Nico Vreeland, on February 10th, 2010
[UPDATE: Evidently, Wordpress thinks it's March 19th, 2146. It's not, is it?
REUPDATE (RESOLVED): So that was bizarre, but it's over now. For a few hours or so, we were thrown 150 years into the future. Some odd pictures of C4 from the future, after the jump.]
So something weird just happened, and a couple of our finished and half-finished posts got published, even though they were scheduled for hours or days from now.
Evidently, either Wordpress or our web host thought it was in Lost for a second, and forgot what year it was. Even when I changed the publishing dates to the 2011 equivalent, the posts were still published. Weird.
Anyway, doesn’t seem to be affecting anything else, so we’ll just see if it sorts itself out. But if some odd-looking half-a-post showed up in your Reader, please accept our apologies.
…
Continue reading »
by Nico Vreeland, on February 10th, 2010
Some news about books and ebooks from around the web (more after the jump):
- So Amazon is absolutely terrified of the iPad. Amazon is releasing a Kindle software development kit (or SDK), which means we’ll soon see iPhone-style apps for the Kindle. Those apps will suck, because there’s little you can satisfyingly do with an ereader besides read, and one of the rules (according to Kindle 2 Review) states that an app can’t be “a generic reader.” RSS? Nope, can’t use more than 100Kb/month in bandwidth. K2R speculates that apps will be such things as crossword puzzles and simple timers. Color me underwhelmed. To raise the stakes, Amazon bought a touchscreen company the other day. This is all just awful. Amazon needs to realize that the singular purpose of the Kindle (and ereaders like it) is a selling point, not a liability. You compete with the iPad by making the Kindle cheaper, and as simple and easy-to-use as possible; then, you allow library books and hype them. That’s it. Trying to compete with Apple on Apple’s turf will only end in tears, Bezos.
- Speaking of Bezos’s screw-ups, did you hear about this whole Amazon/Macmillan thing? Macmillan wanted to set their prices higher, so Bezos removed all Macmillan books and ebooks from Amazon.com (like a four-year-old who doesn’t get his way). Basically, it was two big stupid corporations fighting to see who could screw up worst, and the winner was Amazon! John Scalzi breaks down exactly how bad they screwed up. Of course, Macmillan’s no prize, either—softly strangling a flourishing market is just not a good idea—but they’re too scared to see straight. Amazon capitulated almost immediately, when the entire world told them they were stupid. But then it took EIGHT DAYS for Amazon to relist the Macmillan books, and now the Kindle editions of books like Wolf Hall are…. wait for it… still $9.99! So, presumably, Macmillan will set its own prices starting in the future, not now. Which means it took Amazon eight days to relist the books because why again? Anyway, this whole thing brought us this awesome Macmillan ad, and makes about the hundredth stupid decision hamfistedly made by Bezos and Amazon’s Kindle team. So congrats to them. For further reading, check out Booksquare and the Guardian. …
Continue reading »
by Nico Vreeland, on February 1st, 2010
 I’ve noticed a mini-trend in the past week or two. First, in the Millions, I saw Confessions of a Book Pirate, an interview with a real, live ebook pirate, code-named “The Real Caterpillar.”
He does a little defense of piracy, which I’ll leave alone in this post, and he also has a few interesting things to say about DRM. Most importantly, he says he would pay more for an ebook without DRM and, when asked what would make him stop pirating books, he says:
I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle.
Caterpillar also lays out the excruciating process he goes through to upload a single book, a process that involves scanning a hard copy page by page, and then proofing the scan by hand, which can take “5 to 40 hours.” Damn.
So, for pirates like Caterpillar, DRM has no stopping effect on their piracy (Caterpillar started years ago, when he couldn’t find digital copies of the books he wanted, so he’s used to scanning), and instead it’s actually a reason to keep doing it, because publishers still don’t offer “clean” copies.
And Caterpillar isn’t the only one who scans. In this summary of a panel at Digital Book World, Peter Balis says the majority of pirated ebooks are scanned galleys, manuscripts, or hard copies. This means DRM is powerless to stop widespread piracy.
From other corners, there have come cries of falling sky, from Macmillan president Brian Napack (and we all know Macmillan isn’t afraid to go to the mattresses), and from music industry group IFPI, whose latest report claims “95% of music is pirated.” That’s a grossly misleading stat, since IFPI also says that the industry has shrunk by only 30% since 2004. Evidently IFPI means 95% of albums are pirated by at least one person—and they don’t seem to know how much revenue loss piracy actually causes. Ars Technica does a pretty thorough examination/dehyperbolizing of the report here.
Still, piracy is a problem. So stipulated. But, as I’ve said for a long time, DRM is not a solution, and providing media in DRM-free formats is actually an incentive to buy it and not pirate it. The argument against DRM-free is that piracy will be easier and more widespread since pirates won’t even have to scan the books. That may be, or it may not (it didn’t happen with DRM-free music). But one thing’s for sure: DRM does not help paying customers in any way. With the iPad coming out soon—along with a whole new slew of DRM headaches—it’s a good time to remember that lesson.
If publishers (and content distributors) continue to fear a potential future threat more than they care about their present, spending, legal customers, I’m afraid I’m not going to shed many tears when major houses tell sob stories about lost revenue.
|
from the archives REVIEW: Hell;
from May 26th, 2009--
"I’ll come right out with it: the language of this novel is great, phenomenal in fact. The book is saturated in detail, but not in the soggy paper towel sort of way."
|
