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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 Arthur McCulloch, on February 22nd, 2010 This is the second installment of our new series, “Read This Book Now.” Put aside everything you’re doing and read Reap immediately. (See the other entries here.)
 Reap, by Eric Rickstad, is a coming of age story set in rural Vermont, where life is bleak and there is little hope of a future. Jessup Burke, an easily distracted, over-trusting youth stumbles into the company of Reg Cumber, a callous ex-con who introduces him into a ruined and paranoid world of drug trafficking.
Reg and Jessup’s worlds intersect when Reg nearly runs down Jessup with his car. Reg, a mechanic by trade, pledges to resurrect Jessup’s inoperable Vega. Lured by prospect of finally being able to visit his out-of-state girlfriend, Jessup agrees to work for Reg, unaware at first that he’s getting paid for harvesting and transporting drugs. Despite sudden moments of fear and unease, Jessup welcome’s Reg’s company, and soon the older man is introducing him to abusing booze and weed.
Rickstad captures the youth and innocence of Jessup, his habit of daydreaming and mooning over his girlfriend, Emily, without being sappy or sentimental. Jessup’s character undergoes complex changes as he is gradually corrupted. As Jessup sheds his adolescence, Rickstad (with wonderful directness and careful prose) allows him to grow increasingly aware of some of his circumstances while retaining a boyish obliviousness to others. …
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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 Sean Clark, on February 18th, 2010 
This book has been chosen as a Great Read
Author: Anthony Pagden
2008, Random House
Filed under Nonfiction, Historical
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
So I’ll say right away that I really enjoyed Worlds at War (I’ve nominated it a Great Read). I don’t have much experience with history books, so writing this review was a tad tricky. It would take 3000 words to summarize this book even cursorily, so I can’t do that. Therefore, this review is pretty short, but please don’t mistake my brevity for disregard. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 16th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel] — I’m reading all the Edgar nominees in the top two categories (Best Novel, Best First Novel By An American Author), and handicapping the choices before the winners are announced in late April. You can track all my reviews of Edgar nominees here.
 Author: Charlie Huston
Ballantine Book, 2009
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
After I finished Mystic Arts, I was shocked to discover that it was Huston’s ninth novel, and not his first. It reads like a talented but inexperienced student wrote it; it bears almost every sign and symptom of a juvenile writer’s work. That’s not all bad: while Huston is guilty of simplicity of plot and character (especially emotional simplicity), he also charges the novel with exuberance and passion.
While Mystic Arts isn’t exactly well written, it offers stylish fun, snappy prose, and a flair for the fascinatingly gruesome. It’s a quick-reading, simplistic yarn that primarily wants to entertain you—a goal that’s all too rare these days. And it succeeds, at least until the final act, when the plot finally unravels and leaves the reader in the lurch.
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By Marc Velasquez, on February 15th, 2010 This is the first part of our new series, “Read This Book Now.” Each week, for the next few months, one of our contributors will recommend a single book. Put aside everything you’re doing and read it immediately.
 I found The Autobiography of Malcolm X on the sale table of an Orlando bookstore. Years earlier, a friend of mine had read it for class—he called it the greatest thing he ever read—and told me it should be at the top of my reading list. I took his reaction for hyperbole, and ignored his suggestion. But when I saw The Autobiography of Malcolm X on sale, I thought, “What the heck? For $4.99, why not?”
I like books, but I have never reacted to a book the way I did to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It was all I could think about. For weeks, my conversations with co-workers all started with the phrase “When Malcolm X was….” I carried the book in my back pocket and read it whenever I had a free minute. It took over my life in a way that no book ever had, or has since.
I wasn’t sure why the book captivated me the way it did. There are very few similarities between Malcolm X and I, and he doesn’t seem like a person with whom I would immediately identify. Yet I did.
In retrospect, I believe that my love for this book came from my background in literature. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the closest thing to an epic we have in American literature, and Malcolm X is the closest we have to an epic hero. (I know, you’re going to make the case for Moby Dick or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and you may have a point. But this is my review, so I stand by my assertion.)
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 12th, 2010  Author: Robert Stone
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
In this collection, Stone is at his best when he’s dallying. Whether it’s an old lush sitting around, freaking people out, or a foolhardy suburban warrior stumbling drug-addled toward some quixotic goal, Stone excels at the second act. He runs into problems after that.
For most of these stories, Stone uses an odd pattern to build twisting, dogleg plots. We start with a man, a lawyer or a writer or a professor, who’s an incorrigible womanizer and a drunk or a druggie. After a length of time establishing a premise (and dallying magnificently), the story veers off in some wild way and leaves that premise—and often the main character—behind.
Sometimes the veering off involves a new point of view, sometimes a new location, sometimes an entire set of new characters. A couple of the stories here, most notably the title piece, “Fun With Problems,” succeed (more or less) with their cutback plot twists. More often, though, the narrative runs off the track, gets lost, and then lays down and dies.
So, while Stone’s writing, and especially his dialogue, are characteristically excellent, Fun With Problems is unsatisfying because the stories’ arcs so often bewilderingly abandon their first halves.
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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.
…
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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. …
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