Canon Shots

I’m Impressed…and a bit taken aback

By Lynn, on July 19th, 2010%

Jeff Bezos made an announcement a little while ago…

Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Hardcover Books

Since we started Closed Circle, my best guess had been that e-readers like Kindle were going to wipe out the market for mass-market books before they dented hardcovers.  I’d focused on the notion that while the Kindle and its kin have their flaws as a single-book replacement, they offer unprecedented options for the multi-book reader/collector who wants to have it ALL right here, right now.  I thought the convenience would more than make up for the fact that some publishers have pegged their ebook prices above their mass market prices—because that’s how it’s been working for me.

I don’t buy many hardcovers, so I don’t understand that mindset.  I figured that people who buy hardcovers value the premium experience of having books that don’t need bookends on their shelves and that they’d be resistant to ebooks.  But virtually all ebooks are priced ‘way below the hardcover.  Even if I was right about the hardcover mindset, it appears that economic pressures are ruling the day

10 comments   publishing   , ,  

Further adventures with Kindle Kaos

By Lynn, on May 4th, 2010%

So, there I was at 1AM Saturday morning, sitting alone in an emergency-room examination room, waiting for my neighbor to return from the x-ray, trying—with limited success—to ignore the very, very unhappy young man in the next examination room, the almost as unhappy emergency-room personnel attempting to treat him, and the quartet of policemen who were quietly mediating the whole otherwise LOUD affair. 

Obviously, I was in the emergency room because I’m a night-owl.  When my neighbor realized that he was suffering from something more than the ordinary upset stomach, he looked out his front window and saw that my lights were still burning.  He called and asked if I could take him to the ER.  All other things being equal, there’s no way I would have said No, but I did have the presence of mind to grab the Kindle on my way out.

I’ve been dutifully loading up my Kindle with samples (and freebies) so I had a fair assortment of titles to choose from while I was waiting.  I’d gotten recommendations for Schaeffer & Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society from non-conspiring friends.  I called up the sample, which—given that the book is written in the form of short letters to and from a variety of correspondents (not a strict literary “conversation” between two correspondence) — was more than a little confusing and barely about Guernsey, but I went ahead and pushed the little button to activate WhisperNet.  Moments later, deep in the window-less ER, the text appeared.

Yeah….the kindle and its kindred are changing the reading experience.

But it’s not perfect…or, rather, digital content remains a work in progress.

I’ve been a TIME magazine subscriber since I was a college freshman.  (For better or worse my prose style has its roots in the pages of TIME) but TIME’s going through changes.  The printed magazine’s thinner now (and arrives on Saturday, not Tuesday), they’ve got a website, a direct-to-Kindle version, and a direct-to-iPad version.  The website material is free, everything else has (a variety of) subscription fees and I’ve started to wonder where the bang-for-the-buck sweet-spot is.

A couple weeks ago, TIME did an issue focused on the 50th anniversary of the FDA’s approval of Enovid for the explicit purpose of birth control.  (Without which the 60s would have been much less fun.)  The Editorial page made a big thing about how they’d expanded the cover essay into a Kindle ebook, so I decided to compare the special ebook, the magazine article, and the website.  (I decided against a Kindle TIME trial subscription—since I was pretty confident that would have less content than the printed magazine article—and I can’t seem to access an TIME iPad edition, having neither an iPhone nor an iPad.)

The results were unexpected.  The special expanded ebook had, maybe, an extra sentence or two per paragraph, but didn’t significantly expand the scope of the printed article.  I don’t begrudge the money spent for the comparison, but I won’t be buying any more “expanded” versions for my Kindle.  The website article, which wasn’t behind a subscibers-only paywall, was loaded with links to graphics, sidebars, other articles in the TIME archive, and to offsite information.  I was able to capture the “print” version of the article, links intact, with a simple select-copy-paste into Word Perfect which then allowed me to turn the page into a links-intact PDF document.  With a bit of effort, I could get Calibre to convert either the PDF or the WordPerfect document into a .mobi file for the Kindle—though I’d lose the links (just as there were no links in the “expanded” ebook.)

So, right now, the TIME website has more content than either the printed magazine or their special ebook-prepped material; and the website’s free.

Short-sightedly, I like the idea that free is best, but, in the long run, I fear my favorite magazine’s days are numbered.

4 comments   Florida, publishing    

An interesting analysis of the “agency model”

By Lynn, on April 2nd, 2010%

Random House vs. Apple’s iPad: Stall Tactics Only Hurt Authors, Sales

with thanks to Elaine—who always enjoys legal humor

3 comments   publishing    

Administrivia – Part 2

By Lynn, on February 18th, 2010%

I have been remiss.  A week or so ago, at the height of the Amazon/Macmillan kerfluffle, a commenter pointed out that nowhere here at Face of Chaos did I take the time to identify myself nor had I done anything to satisfy a newcomer’s curiosity about my storytelling.

I took steps to seal both those loopholes, then promptly developed massive allergy symptoms and forgot highlight them.

So….in case you hadn’t noticed….

All posts are now coming from Lynn Abbey instead of Lynn and I’ve added PAGES to my blog header.

Click on the “About” tab at the top of the page and you’ll find my “3rd Person” biography.  As writing assignments go, writing about myself ranks down there with revising the tax code, but it covers the basics.

The second tab “Bibliography / 1st Chapters” is cut-and-paste from my website lynnabbey.com.  It’s a collection of links to the “my books” pages I created back when static websites were the new kids on the block.  Aesthetically, they’re pretty dated now, but just about every book I’ve written has a web page where I wrote a short essay about the book and then displayed the first chapter in HTML format. 

Turning those HTML chapters into e-readable downloads is one of the many items beneath the round tuit on my desk, but, in the meantime, if anyone wants to sample my fiction….

(I am, by the bye, nearing completion of the OCR clean-up of Daughter of the Bright Moon . By Sunday, I expect to be exploring the mysteries of ToC creation and format conversion.   Fingers crossed, but by mid-week, I might actually have a novel (!) for sale over at Closed Circle )

And, finally—during the kerfluffle the Teleread blog posted links to some of posts.  I’d not heard of them before, but they’ve quickly become a preferred source for news and opinion regarding the rise of digital prose and ereaders. I don’t agree with everything I’ve read there, but I’ve found Teleread to be have consistently interesting original material and to be a good aggregator of other pertinent articles and posts.

Since they were nice to me.  I’m adding them to my blogroll and recommending that you click on over….

7 comments   publishing, techstuff    

Stray thoughts

By Lynn, on February 6th, 2010%

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.

10 comments   publishing   , ,  

Pronoun Problems (Macmillan Again)

By Lynn, on February 4th, 2010%

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

7 comments   fiction, publishing   , , ,