According to Huffington Post, after the iPad launch Walter Mossberg cornered Steve Jobs to ask a pertinent question:

On Friday, this exchange was explained. Macmillan demanded that Amazon jack up the prices of e-books to $14.99. In response, Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books. That includes all books from Tor and Forge, the science fiction and fantasy publishers.

As it happens, next month’s book at the book club I go to is published by Tor. I went to buy a copy on Friday, not knowing about the dispute. I had seen it available for Kindle before, and wondered why it was no longer available.

Then I shrugged, and bought a dirt-cheap used paperback copy instead. If Amazon had given in and upped the price to over $10, rather than refusing to sell it, I’d have done the same.

The thing is, a book is something I rarely read more than once. There are so many good books out there, I feel like it would be crazy to re-read when I could read something new to me. Hence $15 for a book is expensive entertainment, compared to $15 for a CD I’ll listen to many times, or $3 for a movie rental.

I suspect that I’m not unusual in this respect, and that Amazon have done the market research, and concluded that DRM-crippled e-books are never going to sell for more than $10–particularly not when you can pick up a paperback for $5 including shipping. Rather than devalue the Kindle and allow other publishers leverage to introduce their own disastrous price increases, Amazon is playing hardball and opting not to sell Macmillan books–which is their right in a free market, isn’t it?

Apple did the same thing with the music industry, pushing them to keep prices at 99¢ per track. Later, the big music companies were allowed to increase prices in return for dropping DRM. Everyone loved it when Apple forced prices down, but this time there are some angry voices.

John Scalzi is one of them. He’s pretty angry at Amazon. Reading between the lines, I think he’s pretty angry at his publisher too, for trying to sell his books at a price he doesn’t think most people will buy at. Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow proposes the iTunes Music Store solution: allow publishers the freedom to set prices however they like, if they drop DRM and abusive EULAs. (Sounds good to me, as it makes the problem somewhat self-correcting–if publishers jack up the prices too high for the market, copyright violation ensues.)

I can understand why Macmillan’s authors are upset by what Amazon have done, but fundamentally, I think this is a very simple problem: Macmillan has decided to set its prices higher than Amazon thinks it can sell books at, so Amazon is choosing not to sell Macmillan books. If you’re an author published by Macmillan, I think the people you really need to be directing your ire at are at your publishing company, for attempting to raise prices in the middle of a terrible recession. In the mean time, well, I guess I’ll buy your books used.

I was enthusiastic when the Orwell Diaries project started. It was a great idea–repost George Orwell’s diaries as if he was posting them live to the web through a 70 year time warp.

Today, I finally unsubscribed. The main thing I’ve learned is that George Orwell was an incredibly boring diarist, mostly concerned with detailing what the weather was like that day, and how many eggs his chickens had laid.

A few weeks ago I read “Ender’s Game”. I think Orson Scott Card is a pretty loathesome individual, but it’s one of those SF novels everyone references, so I thought I ought to read it.

To my surprise, I discovered that the novel is full of homoerotic subtexts. Well, actually, sometimes they’re surface texts: The horrible alien creatures menacing earth are called “buggers”; the young boys trained to fight them sleep naked together in group dormitories; there’s a soaped-up wrestling match in the showers; and in one particularly touching scene, one boy gives another boy a forbidden kiss. Oh, and the teenage boys show practically no interest in girls.

Given that Card is infamously homophobic and against same-sex marriage, I’m going to guess that it’s all unintentional, and that in his case homophobia indicates what it usually does: repressed same-sex desire. It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for him–but not quite.

As to the literary merits of the novel, I wish they had been more evident. The dialog is simply absurd. He tries to head off the criticism in the introduction, but I’m not buying it. No child speaks like the kids in “Ender’s Game”; not even a child prodigy.

[Spoilers follow]
Continue reading →

There’s a meme going around: in 15 minutes, come up with a list of 15 books that “will always stick with you”. Since lists on their own aren’t all that interesting, I’ve added some notes about why I’ve chosen these books.

If you’re a Douglas Adams fan, Robert Sheckley is probably a good bet. He wrote mostly SF with a satirical comedy bent, and was widely acclaimed for it.

I’ve found a few of his novels disappointing–”Options“, for example, seems to fall apart part-way through and meander around. “The Status Civilization“, though, is excellent. It does have a few visible seams from its original publication in magazine serial form, but they don’t detract too much from the story.

I read it on Kindle, via the wonders of Project Gutenberg.

Ten books on my bookshelf which almost certainly aren’t on yours.

Previous entries, withdrawn because they are insufficiently rare:

Dear Amazon,

You’re so almost there with your new Kindle e-book. There are just a few minor details you need to fix to get me on board.

First of all, you need Mac support, and preferably Linux support as well, both for content creation and for reading books. There’s really no excuse for not having reader support, as you have a working Mobipocket reader in Java that will run on Mac and Linux, you just haven’t taken the time to package it up properly. The creation tools ought to be a pretty simple task to port too; a command line version would be fine. I don’t even care if it can’t apply DRM; I just want a way to be able to package up free text.

Secondly, you need to either drop the DRM, or drop the price of the books. Let’s consider a real example here. I’m about to start reading Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

Let’s get one thing straight here: because there’s DRM, I can’t sell the book when I’m done with it, which breaks the first sale doctrine. Therefore, you’re not actually selling e-books, you’re renting them to me for an indefinite period of time, a bit like Netflix does with DVDs. I’d respect you more if you admitted that.

Anyhow, If I go the Kindle route, it’s $9.99 for the book.

Suppose I go the paper route instead. I can pick up a new copy on amazon.com marketplace for $12 plus $4 shipping = $16. When I’m done reading it, I can sell it for $9 second hand. Total cost to me = $7.

So the Kindle is more expensive, and I can’t actually buy the books. That to me is a poor deal.

Oh, sure, Kindle prices include network bandwidth… but with paper books, I had to include the cost of physically shipping dead tree across the country, and I still came out ahead. If you can’t beat the paper book price-per-reading, you’re doing something seriously wrong.

We’ve all watched the music industry flail around overcharging for DRM-burdened files and get nowhere. Learn from their mistakes. Drop the DRM, or drop the book prices to $5 or so (comparable to a DVD or video game rental, plus some markup to cover network costs) and I’ll order my Kindle tomorrow.

Update: Of course, if you gave me the Kindle for free, I’d use it to buy books from you, and look on the extra cost as a convenience fee.

Washington Post:

c.f. Second Variety.

See also Which Philip K. Dick Story Are We In Today?

I’ve decided that it’s really time I learned US history and passed the Citizenship Test. Most intelligent Americans seem to view the test as some kind of joke, but my attitude is the same as my approach to the driving test: I don’t just want to be good enough to pass, I actually think I have a duty to go beyond that and really learn properly.

The same can’t really be said of the average American. In January of this year, Synovate conducted a random telephone survey of 1,000 US adults, with a resulting margin of error of 3%. They found that fewer than 1% of respondents could identify the rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, 17% of them said it mentioned the right to drive a car, and 38% of them thought it gave you the right to “take the fifth”. Also, 21% of people thought the Constitution mentioned the right to own pets.

On the other hand, 20% of respondents could name all the members of the immediate Simpson family, which reminds me of a UK comedy sketch of years ago in which the US immigration quiz was revised to include questions that tested knowledge people actually need to know in order to fit in in the USA—like “Please sing the first verse of the Mickey Mouse Club song” and “Name three items from the McDonalds value menu”.

I have a copy of The Cartoon History of America. ‘m wondering what book to go with after that; suggestions are welcome. I’m also open to CD-ROMs, audio books, web sites, whatever. I’ve been thinking about Don’t Know Much About History by Kenneth C Davis as an audiobook; it seems to get slammed as “leftist” “liberal rubbish“, so it probably doesn’t just cover the politically correct history the US wants to believe.

Sentiment: sorrow
SF savant Stanisław
so sadly silent