Internet safety tip: DO NOT image-google "hardcover book," even with the safe search on moderate.

By now, you’ve probably seen the NYT’s story on publishers phasing out the hardcover book in response to ebooks. Paperbacks are coming out earlier, and “many publishers” now “wonder if cost-conscious shoppers are reading e-books right away rather than waiting for the paperback.”

(You can stop wondering, publishers. They definitely, definitely are.)

So. Hardcovers are mortally injured and slowly dying. This is excellent news. I agree with Paul Constant over at the Stranger (and with myself) that the hardcover business model is unsustainable in a digital world. It continues to actively hurt publishing, but at least publishing seems to be growing aware of that hurt.

Since ebooks were first introduced, publishers have bent over backwards to protect the exorbitant retail prices of new-release hardcover books. They struggled to make distributors adopt the agency model, so they could drive up the prices of ebooks (even though they make less money with agency-priced books). They did that only to make hardcover prices seem like less of a rip-off.

This environment is great for established, in-demand authors like George R.R. Martin, who sold 170,000 hardcover copies of Dance with Dragons in just one day. But climbing the hardcover hill makes it harder than ever for new authors and unknowns to get the recognition they deserve. The higher the price of books, the fewer risks readers will take.

By contrast, without hardcovers, there’s no disincentive to buy the newest books and try out lesser known, lesser publicized authors. The death of the hardcover will make for a happier, healthier reading culture, and that will create more book sales, no matter what that crazy Macmillan CEO says (he also bribes people for the right to sell expensive textbooks to poor African kids).

Releasing paperbacks a little bit earlier won’t help either, it’ll only increase people’s incentive to wait for that paperback before buying a new book. That’s not a sound way to cash in on all that first-edition marketing. (Quick, name a book you were thinking about buying six months ago but didn’t.)

Only the death of the hardcover will do now. I can’t wait to rejoice when they finally kick the bucket.

Kids' books are one area that the Nook Color doesn't need to improve on.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the Nook Color, and found it good, but unfinished. While it has its share of problems, almost every one of them could be fixed with software adjustments and firmware updates. Here’s my wish list for the big update rumored to be scheduled for January.

Smooth edges

The biggest problem with the Nook Color is that its interface needs some smoothing. It sometimes takes an extra tap to wake the screen up, and navigating—especially in magazines—can be laggy and frustrating.

This isn’t the first time B&N has rushed a Nook to market: when the original Nook came out last year (just in time for the holidays), most reviews agreed that its interface was similarly laggy, and in later months B&N improved it markedly. Hopefully that happens again here.

Fix note-taking

Right now, you have to pin each note you take to a patch of text, and the firmware doesn’t distinguish between notes and regular highlights. If it did distinguish, and gave you more note-taking options (like, for instance, taking notes in magazines), it would make this a much more desirable device for students.

I’d also like to see more integration with a word processor—perhaps in the next hardware generation this could even happen through Bluetooth.

Apps – Instapaper, Goodreads, Evernote, Etc.

I desperately want Instapaper on this puppy, especially an Instapaper app that auto-downloads everything you’ve sent to your account, so you could read everything offline, like the way the Nook already does newspapers.

I’d also love to see an Overdrive app for managing library books and library audiobooks, a Goodreads and/or Copia app for social reading, a Google Editions app, and Evernote for proper note-taking. All of these (except probably the Overdrive app) are well within the range of possibility. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Wattpad, Smashwords, Scribd, the list goes on.

Document creation

There’s a cover in the Nook store boasting about an easel design that “creates a solid base for typing on your NOOKcolor’s keyboard.” Sounds awesome, but what the hell are you typing? As of yet, there isn’t even a note app. I’d love to be able to write in a proper word processor, even if it was bares bones. Even a simple Notes feature would be enough.

More content

So far, about 20 newspapers are available, and less than 100 magazines. I’d like to see a lot more, please. I especially want to see smaller niche magazines represented—right now, the magazines are mostly general interest titles with large circulations, like GQ and Glamour—I’d like to see smaller magazines and lit mags be able to publish in the B&N store. I’d also like to see…

Comic books

I’m not a comic book guy, but I would buy one entire buttload of comics on this thing. When this happens, and it will, check out Chamber Four’s comics correspondent Aaron Block to find some good books to read.

Mixed content

The official Nook Color commercial features, at one point, a woman reading a cookbook with a video embedded in it, showing her how to whisk. I would like that cookbook, please. I’ve tried looking for it in the Nook store, but I can’t find it, if it even exists. B&N needs to frontload the kind of content that really shows off this device.

Of course, I don’t want books to become series of small movies, but I do want to see that kind of thing from magazines and newspapers.

More support for content interacting

Specifically, there should be an option next to “Look up in Google” and “Look up in Wikipedia” for “Look up in B&N store.” That way, if you’re reading a book review, you can easily find the book. You should also be able to do this with music and even movies. There are millions of other ways different kinds of content could interact, but I think this one makes sense as the ground-breaker, because it carries the most financial incentive to get the ball rolling.

A way to share whole articles

I want to be able to save articles from newspapers to read later, or be able to send article recommendations to friends. If you share something on Facebook, the link leads to the book or newspaper in the Nook store, which is pretty self-serving and not very customer-serving.

To put this another way: one of my favorite sections in the New York Times is “Most E-mailed.” If you skip a few days of the paper, that section comes in every edition, so you can always find the most interesting articles you missed. But: if everybody had a Nook Color, that section would disappear, because there’s no way to email an entire article to a friend.

That’s about it. A modest list for a first update. I’ll check back in after the update comes out to see how it stacks up.

Sales do not make a book "unputdownable"

Publishing is not a victim of the iPad, it’s not a victim of Amazon’s $9.99 pricing model, it’s not a victim of piracy, it’s not a victim, period. Publishing is slowly strangling itself by myopically hard-selling each and every title it cranks out, instead of nurturing the readers who sustain it.

I believe the novel is the best form of entertainment available to modern humans. Reading a novel offers a deeper, richer, longer, and more satisfying experience than any other media. I read four great novels last year (one, two, three, four). I enjoyed those four books more than any movies or TV shows I saw last year, more than any album, or live show, or play, or anything else.

But there were only four of them.

The flipside of the entertainment equation is that books are more expensive than movies, TV shows, or albums—more expensive in terms of both money and time. If you hate a movie, you’re out ten bucks and ninety minutes. A book might take up days of your time, and up to $25 in hardcover—if you read a bad one, the sting is much worse. And it gets exponentially worse when publishers overtly lie to their readers—like say, The Girl She Used to Be, which was nominated for a mystery award though it’s neither a mystery nor worth printing, let alone reading.

Publishers don’t seem to realize this, and they’ve taken a shotgun approach to bookselling: they think if they can fire enough tiny pellets of low-grade iron, one of them’s got to hit something. I’m here to disagree.

Problem: Publishing too many books, and too many crappy books

In 1993, according to Bowker, U.S. publishers released just over 10,000 books classified as either “Fiction” or “Literature.” In 2007 (the last year Bowker has a final tally for), publishers released more than 62,000 Fiction/Literature books (via; find the raw numbers here). That’s one work of fiction published every eight and a half minutes, all year long.

Since the average reader takes slightly longer than eight minutes to read a novel, we’ve got to choose. In 2009, I had a bad year choosing. I read and reviewed 31 books for C4 last year. Eleven were bad; ten were “OK, but…”; six were good; and only four were great.

Even if you lump in good books, that’s a 32% success rate. Less than a third of the contemporary books I read were worth the time and money, and that’s excluding all the books I tried to read, hated, and never finished.

Here’s an idea I don’t understand: Why—in an age where books have to compete with more TV shows and more movies and more video games—why are publishers releasing even more books? More than six times as many as just 17 years ago, which means one of two things: either six times as many publishable novels are being written, or publishers are lowering their standards. You might be able guess which theory I agree with.

Get your stupid from the TV, come to books for smarts

A billion Dan Brown fans might tell me I’m wrong, but I don’t think books do a good job with stupid, mindless entertainment. TV’s got stupid and mindless covered. Books should play to their strengths: intelligence, depth, and drama. Not that all novels should be stodgy period pieces, but neither do so many need to be vampire books because Twilight was popular, or any of the thousands of other coattail-riding knockoffs. And neither do we need thousands of plain old crappy books with half-conceived plots, pushed out to meet a pub date instead of being actually nurtured until they were good (or simply rejected).

In this piece, Jay Nicorvo says editors are putting out blockbusters and clones because of more guaranteed sales. That strategy might work in the short term; it might make more money this quarter. The downside is that it’s actively killing publishing, bit by bit.

Right, so, let’s just make all books better. That shouldn’t be too difficult, right?

Before you start poking holes in that proposal: I know that it’s a pipe dream. I know judging a novel’s quality is a subjective activity, I know that publishing is a business, and I know there are many many more publishing houses now than there were twenty years ago, all trying to make a buck. But, as a reader, I feel disillusioned. It seems like publishers are willing to release 50 mediocre novels in the hope that one becomes a hit, rather than select the 5 best and put more effort into them.

It seems, in short, like publishers aren’t culling bad novels like they should be, and then readers have to do it, which means sifting through dozens or hundreds of published novels to find just the few worth reading. And that gets old.

If we’ve got so many choices, we need a better way to choose

A while ago, I floated the idea of trial periods for ebooks, some length of time during which readers could return books they don’t like. I think that would go a ways toward reestablishing faith in the publishing industry (tag line: “Never read another bad book”), but I think to fully stabilize and grow the industry, publishers need a major shift in attitude.

Instead of publishing as many novels as possible and trying to market their way to good sales figures, publishers should focus on cultivating readers. By that I mean the first priority of a publisher should be to ensure that readers find books they love. That doesn’t mean describing every book as “hilarious,” it doesn’t mean puking out Harry Potter clones in the hope of getting a few more sales, and it doesn’t mean bending over backward to convince people that the latest stock vampire novel is actually good or different (they did that with the last stock vampire novel, and they lied). Instead, publishers should be finding the qualities that individual readers look for and pairing them with novels that actually have those qualities.

This is the kind of thing that companies like Amazon got right—as much as it pains me to admit. When publishers told Bezos to delete negative reviews on Amazon.com, he replied, “We don’t make money when we sell things, we make money when we help people make purchase decisions.”

Like Bezos himself, that response is 90% creepy robot, but he’s got a point. If you match readers with books they love, they will read more, they will like books more, and they will spend more money on them.

Publishers, for some reason, hate to match readers with books they will like. Look at the descriptions on Random House’s fiction page, and let’s play Glowing Platitude Bingo. “Dazzling”? “Wondrous”? “Lush”? “Moving”? Bingo.

I want a Netflix system for books, one that goes beyond Amazon’s linked metadata, and doesn’t require me to read bought reviews by Publishers Weekly, or dozens of customer reviews by people who might or might not know what they’re talking about. (Just take a gander at the responses our own Sean Clark got when he uploaded to Amazon a fairly even-handed review of what appears to be an unquestionably bad book.)

Another symptom of the disease: Publishers’ hatred for libraries

The root problem, again, is myopia. Publishers want to sell more books right now, not in a few years or decades. But their customer base is eroding. People have many more ways to spend their free time now than they did in 1993.

This myopic attitude was thrown into relief by Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s thoughts about libraries, which he expressed in March. He said that he wanted people to pay for library books, and questioned how libraries could possibly be good for the publishing industry.

From a certain angle, this makes a bit of sense. If people can get books for free, it must eat into profits at some point. But here’s the other angle: when I was eight years old, my parents told me they’d buy me as many books as I wanted. That lasted a couple of months before they cut me off and sent me to the library. If there had been no library, I would’ve watched TV and found something else to do with my life.

Let me say it in no uncertain terms: if we eliminate free public libraries, it will be exactly one generation before there won’t be enough readers to publish 1000 books a year, let alone 60,000. Libraries nurture readers. Publishers should learn from this.

One last plea

It’s arguable whether or not there are 60,000 publishable novels written this year. But if, as an industry, you’re going to give me 60,000 choices, you’ve got to give me the tools I need to find the books that are right for me. Otherwise I and your other avid readers will wander off into the wilderness of the millions of crappy books you’re all too willing to bring into the world.

Publishers, please. Please help me. I’m speaking as someone lost deep in the forest here; I love books, but I’m enjoying reading less and less these days. Something has to change. Quit whining about piracy and ebook prices. Fix this instead.

If you were considering a Kobo, think seriously about this instead. Basic-model ereaders are more or less interchangeable, and Sony supports Adobe ePub, which means you can borrow library ebooks through your local library (Kobo supports Adobe, too—the difference is 35 bucks). Sony software is a headache, but if you’re reading books and loading up only once a month or so, it’s not so bad. And $115 is a great price.

Auletta’s article was clear about one thing though: in the long run, ebook prices must fall.  He closes by quoting “a skeptical literary agent” who says, “You can try to put on wings and defy gravity, but eventually you will be pulled down.”  In other words, eventually, consumer expectations will win.  If buyers think ebooks should be cheap, then they better be cheap or no one buys.

But how cheap?  With no printing or shipping, the cost of making and selling one more ebook is practically nonexistent.  This is the biggest advantage of digital publishing, and maybe also the biggest obstacle to fair ebook pricing.  If one more ebook costs publishers nothing, how much should they charge for it?  They have to charge more than nothing, but how much more?  How low can prices go to meet consumer expectations and still benefit publishers?

Fair warning to the faint of heart: this is about to get intensely nerdy.  It’s about to get economic.

First my qualifications as an economist: I took a couple of economics courses in college, I regularly read the Economist, and I’ve enjoyed books like Freakenomics and The Armchair Economist.  I also make a lot of assumptions.  With that in mind, I’d like to offer an amateur attempt at modeling price for a product that incurs no marginal costs, and I’d like to invite criticism from any of you masochists who read past the jump.

Theoretically, a firm will maximize profits by producing to the point where the marginal cost of one more unit is equal to the marginal revenue generated by that unit.  If we assume MC = 0, then a firm will maximize its profits where MR = 0.  Beyond this point, it could sell more copies, but only at lower prices and a net loss to total revenue.

Given a normal, linear, downward-sloping demand curve, MR will always have the same y-intercept as the demand curve and double the slope (in absolute value, since both will have a negative slope).  So MR will cross the quantity axis, meaning zero out, at a point exactly half way between the origin and the demand curve.

What does this mean for ebook pricing?  As my microeconomics professor taught his classes to say, it depends on the elasticities.  Elasticity describes the responsiveness of one variable to change in another.  It’s reflected in the slope of the demand curve.  A steep slope means demand is inelastic, and a unit change in price corresponds to a proportionally smaller change in the quantity demanded.  A shallower slope means demand is elastic, and a unit change in price will cause a proportionally higher change in the quantity demanded.

Bored yet?  The painful part is almost over.

Here’s why that matters: if demand for ebooks is inelastic, then MR = 0 at a point closer to the origin, corresponding with higher prices and lower quantities on the demand curve; publishers will maximize profits by selling fewer ebooks at higher prices.  If, on the other hand, demand for ebooks is elastic, then MR = 0 at a point farther from the origin, corresponding with lower prices and higher quantities on the demand curve; publishers will maximize profits by selling more ebooks at lower prices.

This is all fairly dense, it rests on a lot of assumptions, and in order for this analysis to be any help in setting a specific price point publishers would need to know a lot of things that they probably can’t know.  So what good is it?  Here, I believe the theory accurately describes the situation publishers currently face.  Should they continue jockeying to charge higher prices for their products, or should they seek opportunities to charge less and sell more?

Everything I know about ebooks suggests that demand for them is essentially elastic.  There are a lot of substitutes available, other titles we might buy, paper books, or other things we might choose to do with our leisure time besides read.  This is the last assumption I’m going to make here, and if it’s correct, then not only should ebook prices be falling, but publishers should be falling all over themselves to push new, creative (and cheap) marketing strategies to increase demand for ebooks so they can sell more and more of them at lower prices.  Everyone will be better off.

That being said, ebook prices will necessarily be sticky for a while.  Publishers need time to reduce their fixed costs, and since most books sold are still paper bound, publishers still have real marginal costs.  But publishers have to move.  They should be racing each other to lower prices by promoting and packaging ebooks more intelligently.  To borrow a phrase from Richard Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom.  If the publishers don’t get there first, there are armies of startups and upstarts, people for whom books are a passion first and a business second, and many of them are better positioned to take advantage of new media and digital distribution.

• What’s the purpose of libraries in the 21st century? Salon says the new main branch of the Cambridge Public Library (just blocks from C4 HQ) isn’t practical. The Guardian says libraries still matter in a digital age, and so does an Australian librarian (via). And Ars Technica reveals how libraries help America’s poor. We already know Macmillan hates libraries. I don’t enjoy this line of discussion.

• What’s the last great book you read? John Crace in the Guardian discusses how difficult it is to find a great a novel these days, because there are far too many books and publishers will tell you each and every one of them is mind-blowingly fantastic. I couldn’t agree more. Crace recommends genre fiction; meanwhile, on the Guardian’s books blog, a post about how shorter can be better for fiction. And then, crime novelist Ian Rankin discusses/defends crime fiction (via). I’m inclined to agree with all this, the only problem is that I’ve been reading all the Edgar award nominees—supposedly the best of the year in a genre that’s right up my alley—and not a single one of them has been great. It’s a nice theory, though.

• Piracy is still a hot topic, though now people are complaining that “piracy” is such a sexy word it makes people want to pirate. The ethicist at the NYT says you can steal a copy of an ebook you previously bought—counterpoint. Despite the ethicist, IsoHunt will essentially be shut down has essentially been shut down. Finally, Big Content wants the U.S.’s new intellectual property enforcer to eliminate peer-to-peer file-sharing. Good luck with that.

• Here is an article from the NYT about literature and cognitive science. Basically, it’s about how empathy relates to reading fiction, and how readers process interrelated or overlapping points of view. Or “what the scholars call levels of intentionality.” Read it.

Obligatory iPad and Amazon news—and lots of other stuff—after the break.

• Some obligatory iPad news— Farhad Manjoo says resisting the iPad is futile, and on the day of its release 300,000 people didn’t even try. Also, a quarter million ebooks have already been downloaded, which seems like a lot. The big iPad question, from an ebook standpoint, is whether it will replace E-Ink ereaders. The answer is an overwhelming yes. Umm, or no. Or kind of. So probably not, in other words. That wasn’t too confusing, right? Anyway, the comics app looks pretty outstanding. Here are some more reviews of the iPad, and that’s just about enough of it. Wait, one more, for haters: will it blend?

• The obligatory Amazon v. agency model news— After Amazon finally capitulated to the agency book-pricing model (and a transition that was anything but seamless), they made sure everybody knew who was raising prices. Random House doesn’t want an agency deal, though, possibly because they hate authors. More likely because it doesn’t make any sense to make less money on each ebook and also sell fewer books. Meanwhile, HarperCollins gave away so many ebooks that it seemed simply too good to be true. Finally, between agency models and Apple iPads, what would you do today if you were Jeff Bezos? (I would cackle and cackle, simply because I could.)

• A few weeks ago novelist Carrie Vaughn left Grand Central Publishing, and wrote this post about why she did it (via). It’s an interesting piece, and it’s mostly about a non-compete clause. Coincidentally, Grand Central is responsible for this travesty of literature, which is very bad.

• Quick takes: the Guardian on the “lost Booker”; David Mamet on drama; Elmore Leonard and sons on writing; a terrific essay on Maoists in India by Arundhati Roy, part one and part two; what constitutes fair use?; how not to title a novel.

• Random of the week: A pair of brothers spent several months “squatting” on the side of a wall in Rio de Janeiro as part of an art installation. Here are some more pictures.

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.

• The Millions has a list of newly released books. I’m most excited about Ron Rash’s story collection. His last novel was excellent.

• Quick takes: Yann Martel has been sending aliterate Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper a book every two weeks for three years; Charles Pellegrino is the newest James Frey (side note: this guy is the James Frey of photographers); TeleRead’s Paul Biba says he’s sold on the Alex reader; the Tournament of Books is live (via)—bookmark it; we’re smack in the middle of Read an eBook Week; the NY Times is making an ereader edition of their Book Review section—makes sense, right?

• Random of the week: Contrariwise is a great site featuring pictures of people’s literary-themed tattoos. Below is my favorite from their Alice in Wonderland series, coincidentally from the passage that gave Contrariwise its name.

and this is just rad:

]]> http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/24/wednesday-links-2-24-10/feed/ 0 http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/23/douglas-preston-jerk-comes-crawling-back-to-his-readers/ http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/23/douglas-preston-jerk-comes-crawling-back-to-his-readers/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:59:27 +0000 Nico Vreeland http://chamberfour.com/?p=6423

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 ]]>

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.