Face of Chaos

I pretty much took the weekend off.

I cleaned, which I really needed to do; got caught up on some mundane, domestic paperwork; and made a bug…

I’ll get back to work tomorrow…

I don’t think there’s been such an interesting (in that proverbial Chinese-curse sense) or exciting time in the publishing industry.  Movable type, maybe, but that didn’t occur against the backdrop of the Internet and it’s possible that the scriptorium monks weren’t all that heartbroken about losing their jobs.

I’ve tucked up a half-dozen meaty articles for deep reading that hasn’t happened yet.

Here is a sample of my to-be-read stuff:

Apple’s disruption of the ebook market has nothing to do with the tablet

What Should an E-book Cost?

Why do people want more expensive backlist books?

Friday Midday Links: Pricing Debate Continues

Maybe we should be hurting the authors

Piracy. Is. Stealing.

The Futile Struggle Against Free Content

Hachette Increasing eBook Pricing on Amazon

Hachette Announces Agency Model, Simultaneous Releases; Guild Says Macmillan Will Be at 25%

Another New Data Set on eReading

Discussing Ideas to Help Stores Survive

and

It’s an Amazon-Eat-Buy-Button World Out There

Looks like I’m going to be reading for a while.  But my initial speed-reading pass snagged this from an uncredited comment on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish (yeah, this is going around the political blogs, ‘cause they’ve all written books.  It’s strange-bedfellow time.)

A nameless reader says:

Bunch, willfully or not, ignores the fact that while the intellectual property laws — and this goes beyond music and even beyond copyright into patent law — were intended to protect the creation of intellectual property, they have come to be used largely to protect the distribution of intellectual property.  At some point in the life of a creation — and we can have a legitimate argument about when that point is reached — the distribution of a work becomes divorced from its creation.

The reader has seeded my thought clouds.  I felt it in my gut yesterday when Sargent/Macmillan blithely wrote of “our intellectual property,” the laws I’ve always thought were supposed to protect me have been co-opted by entities that view me as a commodity.

The kerfluffle has gone another round.  John Sargent, CEO at Macmillan, has penned an open letter to Macmillan authors and illustrators, with a CC to literary agents.

Already I’m confused.  All agents?  Just those agents with clients at Macmillan?  There is a difference.  But, since I’m definitely a Macmillan author, whose Amazon buttons have yet to reappear, I kept reading…

Over the last few years we have been deeply concerned about the pricing of electronic books. That pricing, combined with the traditional business model we were using, was creating a market that we believe was fundamentally unbalanced.  In the last three weeks, from a standing start we have moved to a new business model. We will make less money on the sale of e books, but we will have a stable and rational market. To repeat myself from last Sunday’s letter, we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated.

About that “we,” Mr. Sargent….  Exactly who are the “we” who’ve been deeply concerned, who’ve moved from a standing start to a new business model in just three weeks!?  I assumed, through the first four sentences, that “we” was “you”—corporate Macmillan—rather than “us”—because why else would you be sending me a letter.

Then I hit the fifth sentence:  …”our intellectual property”…

I checked, just to make certain, but there it is on the title page verso – copyright 2006 / Lynn Abbey.  Rifkind’s Challenge is MY intellectual property.  It is licensed to Macmillan/TOR under a contract that sometimes feels like indentured servitude (or maybe like the old Hollywood studio/contract system).  License is not quite the same as ownership.

But, by golly, they’re going to be fair to “those who create.”

These are the good guys?

Is it any wonder I’m confused…and just a teeny bit skeptical?

Back in the Dark Ages—the mid 70s, the post Star-Wars period when Hollywood started optioning SF—the wise words were: Get all your money up front; and if that doesn’t work never, ever take a share of net anything, especially profits.

So, now I’m back to thinking about that Wall Street Journal article I linked to few days back.  Macmillan’s got the same problem…a problem they can partially solve by sweetening current/future contracts and then offering to sprinkle the same sweetner on old contracts…all in the name of fairness….toward the creators of their intellectual property.

Yeah, there are going to be problems. Somebody’s going to have to come up with the publishing equivalent of United Artists.  UA didn’t change the game because they won an anti-trust suit against the system; they did it by beating the system at its own game

So, I’m still doing the Zumba thing at the Wellness Center.  My knees are handling it, but all that bouncing around has a tendency to loosen my shoelaces.

Fortunately, I recalled that less than a month ago, Lifehacker had a post on this very problem… 

Ditch the Granny Knot to Tie Your Shoes More Efficiently

Complete with instructions!

So I brought my shoes and feet over to the computer and found this…

Yep…reef knot on the left, granny knot on the right (and it was the right shoe lace that kept coming undone).

Does this fall into the “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” category?