The key component of the dust-up between Amazon and book publisher Macmillan (who has since been joined by Hachette Books and HarperCollins) is the pricing model used to sell electronic books. Amazon wants to set a fixed price with a fixed dollar amount going to the publishers. Publishers don’t like this because it cannibalizes their hardcover sales and (they believe) over the long haul, devalues books in general, especially new releases.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden over at Making Light has posted a very informative post about the “agency model” that the publishers would like to use.
Here is a key point she’s trying to make:
The difference between the agency model and Amazon’s plan for world domination is that Amazon wants to license* the ebooks in its Kindle program, control their content, and set their prices. That is: it wants to be the publisher, not a distributor or seller. This might be doable if Amazon were out there negotiating to buy rights at market prices. It isn’t. Amazon expects to have the rights just handed over, as though it were doing the conventional publishers a favor.
In the long run, the Amazon model turns publishers into unfunded R&D labs that are obliged to turn over everything they develop to other companies at rock-bottom prices. It isn’t viable, and it’s not author-friendly in six different ways. Have you ever seen a discussion of how badly messed-up Kindle texts are? Amazon’s business isn’t about books and authors; it’s about selling units at a discount.
There’s a lot more, so I encourage you to head on over and check it out. (It’s a few days old but I’ve been incredibly under the weather and just stumbled over it today.)
Yes, the Northeast has been DUMPED on in a pretty major way. We have about 20 inches of snow here in the Harrisburg area, and it’s still coming down. It’s 11:30 and I’ve only given the barest thought to going out and shoveling. I’m still fighting an awful cold (though feeling better than last night, when I thought my head was going to explode from congestion like that guy’s noggin in Scanners), and don’t have a lot of mo’ to do much of anything. Including writing posts of any length of meaning today.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Kindle and iPad and what the latter’s introduction into the marketplace will do to the former. I talked about it a little bit in my post when the iPad was introduced, and in the comments section there. There is some understandable defensiveness from those who have purchased a Kindle or Nook or are planning to do so about my assertion that “I really don’t expect either of those devices to exist for more than a couple of years at this point. Apple is simply too good with content delivery.” For Kindle and Nook fans, those are fighting words!
I want to be clear that I’m not rooting against dedicated eReaders — I’m very much technology agnostic. I go for whatever’s best for me (as do we all). I don’t like e-ink, I want backlighting, and I want a multipurpose device. Ergo, a dedicated eReader as they currently exist is out. I also think the software on the Kindle’s I’ve played with (I haven’t used a Nook yet) is clunky and awkward and far too inelegant for my taste. But for many of people it’s become a great way to read books, and I’m certainly not ever against that.
Here’s what I am pretty sure of: the iPad (or similar multi-purpose devices with e-reading as a feature set) will do two things: 1) force the price of dedicated eReaders way down the pricing curve, and 2) relegate them into niche status.
The Kindle and Nook fans disagree. So what basis do I have for this assertion that multi-purpose devices crowd out single-purpose devices?
The cell phone.
Cell phones were originally portable phones and nothing more; a way to roam free from the landlines that had everyone stretching curled cords throughout their houses in order to move around while talking. Mobility was just a dream — that’s why pay phones were ubiquitous. If you were in a public place, you had to use a pay phone.
But over time, more and more functionality was added to cell phones. I thought texting was idiotic when I first heard about it. Why the hell would you want to type on such a small thing when you can just call the goddamn person?! But now I text more than I use the actual telephony portion of my phone. I have friends whose teenage kids make ten to twenty thousand texts per month. (Yes, they all have unlimited texting plans). It’s now their primary method of communication. Telephony is now a secondary product on a phone.
We now have cameras on phones. Quality’s not the best, but you don’t need to carry a digital camera if you don’t want to. Sure, a digital camera (or, heaven forbid, actual film camera) can take better pictures than a cell phone camera, but there’s a convenience factor that’s hard to ignore. Snap a photo and with a few clicks you can text it to your friends or Flickr or Facebook wall, or all three.
Over time, more and more functionality crept into our phones. Web browsing, email access, GPS, video recording, and yes, ebook reading. They evolved into multi-function devices. Single purpose cell phones are pretty much extinct. Even the most basic, no-frills phones still come with texting and cameras. You have to look pretty hard to find phones that don’t have these features.
I expect those same pressures to come to bear on dedicated ebook readers. Either they’re going to have to add functionality and spin up into devices similar to the iPad, or they’ll have to become so cheap that they’re almost a throwaway purchase, probably $20 or so. Without one of those scenarios happening, I just don’t see their long term viability.
I wasn’t planning on reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. At least not anytime soon. My reading pile (like most of yours, I’m sure), is huge. Everest-sized. So adding books to it that I’m not sure I’ll like is an iffy proposition at best.
Why wouldn’t I like The Magicians, you ask? Well, there was this review from Ana at The Book Smuggler. I stumbled upon it and it made me think this might not be a book for me.
I unexpectedly received an ARC of it and decided to promote it to the top of the reading pile. I’m glad I did, because I loved it.
This isn’t going to be a debate with Ana about her reasons for not liking the book, which are all perfectly valid for her (and some I very much agree with; more on those in a bit). But this book worked for me. For most of its length it’s an Audi R8 firing all cylinders screaming down the highway at 140 miles per hour.
The Magicians is a odd beast — a literary amalgam of The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter with the wit and sensibility of a modern “literary” novel about angst-filled, disaffected teenagers trying to find their way in the world. Quentin is, by and large, fairly unlikeable — I’ll agree with Ana on that point. But not so unlikeable that I was turned off. I found him to be a realistic portrait of the kind of character Grossman was going for — a privileged kid growing up in New York City who is too intelligent and attentive for his own good. While his action sometimes (hell, often) portray him in a negative light, they also ring completely true.
The story involves Quentin’s discovery that magic is real and he is in fact a magician. He is asked to attend a secret school of magic in upstate New York, where his skills will be honed for the next five years through a combination of classwork and field tests (some of which are highly dangerous). He leaves behind his high school friends and family and departs for Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.
Quentin is an unhappy teenager. When he was a child he loved a series of books about a mystical land named Fillory (an almost point-by-point ripoff of Narnia, to be honest). Fillory made him happy, and he obsessively rereads the books in an attempt to regain that happiness. He believes working real magic will make him happy, but even at Brakebills the happiness he so desperately craves eludes him.
After graduation he and his friends drift about aimlessly, wasting their time with parties and booze and sex and drugs. Quentin is on a downward spiral and knows it, but doesn’t know how to pull out of it.
Then all of them are stunned with the revelation that Fillory is not only real but in mortal danger, and that they are the only ones who have a chance of saving it.
The Magicians is something of a deconstruction of the fantasy genre as exemplified by C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, which is why the complete lack of originality of Fillory or Brakebills (which is simply Hogwarts with a name change) didn’t bother me overly much. Grossman isn’t trying to make them original — he’s using pre-existing tropes to examine his characters and their reactions to the fantastic. I got the impression that Grossman was least interested in writing the fantasy parts — the journey through Fillory when we finally reach it is the dullest, most uninteresting part of the book. And while I agree with Ana that Eliot is an almost shamefully cliched gay man, he wasn’t present enough in the text to bother me, and was more than eclipsed by the wonderful Alice.
The Magicians, ultimately, isn’t about magic — its heart centers on the lives of the people who wield magic. In that regard, it’s a triumph.
I love the Wolfman. Yes I do. I don’t know if I’ll actually like the new movie starring Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Emily Blunt, but I sure want to. I have fond, fond memories of watching the original Wolfman with Lon Chaney, Jr. on television when I was a kid. “Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night, can become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.” Mwa-hahaha!
Where I grew up there were two programs out of Philadelphia on Saturday afternoons — Creature Double Feature and Dr. Shock. I couldn’t get enough of either. It was on those shows that I got my first taste of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, It, Them!, all of the Abbot and Costello horror movie tie-ins (like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man), and a host of other horror and science fiction movies. A few were great, most were sub-par, and some were truly wretched. But I had a blast watching them all. I love horror movies. Love love love them. My son has carried on the tradition, and we have a great time sitting down to watch spooky movies together. He’s only ten so I doubt I’ll be taking him to this particular Wolfman (rated R for bloody violence and gore), but there are still plenty of age-appropriate movies for us to watch.
There’s been a dearth of good werewolf movies since The Howling and An American Werewolf in London. Sure, there have been a few notable smaller films like Ginger Snaps and Dog Soldiers, but nothing really big, nothing iconic. I’m hoping this new version of Lawrence Talbot dealing with the full-moon curse is something great. I’m certainly rooting for it.
For a ton of photos, trailers, and clips from the film, head on over to Shock Till You Drop.
An international trailer for Clash of the Titans was just released. I’m a little surprised at how excited I am for this. I’m even rather fond of the rock music used in the trailer and curious to see if it carries over to the final film.
I was all set to post about my childhood love for all things Wolfman (and horror movies in general), but the Internetsies are still all a-flutter, grousing about the Amazon/Macmillan corporate grudge match. It’s just too damn entertaining! (At least for us writerly types, who, you know, are interested in books from both the writing and reading sides of the table.)
Again, so much has been flying around that I’m just going to link to it and let you read to your little ol’ heart’s content.
There is a lot more info out there, but these three should give you a great idea of what’s going on (and they have plenty of links to others if you’re inclined to surf all day reading about this).
I was planning on writing some thoughts about the kerfluffle between Amazon and publishing house Macmillan regarding eBook pricing in which Amazon has apparently ceased selling Macmillan books (including books from Macmillan imprint Tor, of which Scalzi is an author), but don’t you know it, I sleep a little late today, putz around eating breakfast, and that sly rascal John Scalzi beats me to it. Rats, and double rats.
Twenty-four years. It doesn’t seem that long ago, and yet in other ways it does. I was a college junior at Penn State’s main campus and came back from a class for lunch when my roommate Paul told me the shuttle had blown up. I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. “You mean, like on the launch pad?” I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that the explosion had actually killed anyone.
(Side note: I had that exact same reaction when I watched, live on Good Morning America, the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. My first thought was, “Where did they find an empty passenger liner?” I simply could not believe that someone had flown a plane full of innocent people into a building and killed them all while I was watching.)
Paul said to me, “No, man. They’re all dead.”
I blew off the rest of the day and watched the news. I have been a fan of the space program all of my life. My earliest memory is of my father waking me up when I was about three-and-a-half years old to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I recall him saying, “This is something very important and I want you to see it even if you don’t understand it all,” or words to that effect. I remember Walter Cronkite explaining how the landing would occur with models of the command and lunar modules, which I thought were incredibly cool (and probably spurred my interest in model building when I was older).
I thought the Challenger disaster would be the end of the space program, or at least manned space flight. It wasn’t, and for that I’m grateful. But to this day I still get angry when I think about how easily avoidable this disaster was. Engineers knew the risks with the O-rings and cold weather and told their superiors about it … who did nothing. They turned a blind eye, ignoring the experts in the hope that they could get this launch off with a civilian schoolteacher on board without further delay. They thought a delay would be an embarrassment to NASA.The bureaucrats in charge put political expediency ahead of safety, and it bit them on the ass.
Unfortunately, seven brave men and women had to die for them to learn this lesson.
So think of the Challenger Seven as you go about your day, and remember that they did not have to die, and should not have died.
