Posts Tagged ‘books’

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The Author’s Guild on State of Publishing and My comment

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

http://blog.authorsguild.org/2012/01/31/publishings-ecosystem-on-the-brink-the-backstory/

To which I commented  Monopolies are generally evil, and I hold no brief for Amazon.com– although why Amazon’s evil makes Barnes & Noble and Big Publishing into good guys is beyond me.  B&N with their end-of-the-aisle bribe stacks and books with a shorter shelf life than yoghurt.  Puh-leeze.

I personally have published with big publishers, small ones, university presses, and an independent co-operative press.  While I am, at least for the moment, still a member of the Authors Guild, I do not find them representing my interests.  AG works for  Scott Turow and  others who make a lot of money selling books.  I’m glad Mr. Turow and his ilk have a guild to represent them, but don’t let the Authors Guild fool you into thinking it does anything for people who don’t sell a lot of books.

So we’re living in interesting times.  Lean back and enjoy the ride.

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My first library book on Kindle!

Saturday, October 22nd, 2011

I’ve been telling people that the big problem with Kindle–aside from how hard it is to take notes compared to an old dead tree book– is that you can’t share or borrow the overpriced newer (read in -copyright) books.  It seems to me that e-books absolutely ought to be the cheapest form of books– minimal materials, you can’t lend it to a friend or resell it, etc.  Amazon runs an in-house sharing site where I early on got one good book, the novel about Thomas Cromwell, but it has essentially turned into advertisements for new books for Kindle.

BUT NOW- it has finally happened.  It is finally possible to borrow from the library.  I had to go in person first to get my card renewed  (and I ended up promising to present a program for the library in the spring!) and they were very helpful showing me the website for the regional pool of library e-books, many with waiting lists, but I made the experiment by using “advanced search” and skimming over available books, and found Sarah Waters’ newest.  I now have it on my Kindle, for two weeks, anyhow, and I’m thrilled.  I don’t know how this works region to region, but here you get up to 5 books, and there is no extension– you go back on the waiting list if you didn’t finish.  Fine, who cares.  To borrow a Kindle book, you get sent to Amazon, and I had a little to-do about which email was my sign in, and actually ended up calling and speaking to a human being, but the next phase is beginning to happen….

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Big Pub Panics over Changing Business Model

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Today’s New York Times has an article about the panic among conventional publishers over Amazon.com beginning to publish:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?ref=technology

In the Amazon business model, there’s no advance, and often no agent, although some agents are beginning to participate as publishers.  I have to say that my sympathy for the big commercial publishers  (not that Amazon isn’t or won’t be one soon) is very limited.  They dropped me unceremoniously 25 years ago– well, not entirely true, that was Scribner’s.  My last big publisher was HarperCollins for the Marco kid books, and that was only fifteen years ago– anyhow, the bottom line is, Conventional publishers dropped me and a lot of my friends– mid-list and literary writers of high repute and great accomplishment– and we’ve been scrambling ever since.  I’ve used small presses, nonprofit presses, university presses, cooperative presses:  I’ve published with all of these, as well as with Scribner’s and HarperCollins, and had Sc & HC been more nurturing of me when I was not a best seller for them, I might be less ready to embrace the Great Change going on now with ebooks and self publishing.  There are myriad problems including, at the very least, who are the gatekeepers, but also vast opportunities.  And for me, a lot of fun too.  The opportunities include simply being able to make books available to people who who might want to read them– miniscule numbers beside what bestseller oriented publishers except, but human beings, readers, communication.  I have been having a great time with my various ventures.

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Interesting blog discussion on e-books

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

Engine Books Press has an interestingly balanced discussion of the e-book phenomenon here.

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One More Tale of Genji…

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

… by Murasaki Shikibu, tranlated by Royall Tyler, this time.  I have the full Waley translation and the Seidensticker.  I used to turn up my nose at abridged versions, but I got in the mood again– a damp gray summer early evening on the back screened porch, and  I just wanted to dip, and to taste Genji on the Kindle.  The translation is good, with the poems laid out in a very readable way.  So many sleeves made sopping wet– I mean dew covered, and during Genji’s exile, soaked by waves of salt water.  Such a different ethos, all the fathers and mothers trying to give their well-brought up accomplished daughters to the emperor or other high status men as concubines. Then with political machinations, raising the daughter’s status to possible Empress Mother and the power of the family as well. And then there’s how Genji essentially kidnaps and the little girl and eventually has sex with her and continues to keep her and make her his ideal woman, even while continuing his other affairs, although never failing in attention  to the many women he loves and does not abandon them.  As always, a fascinating excursion into an alternative reality. Dim, all those curtains and blinds, sex enhanced by handwriting.

And yes, it works on the Kindle, the grayness of the screen matches the weather, the spray of mountain waterfalls, the night time creeping in bedrooms, the dawn when you send you love note.  And as to the lower classes–the people who clean the latrines and actually dye the fabrics and cook the meals and empty the chamberpots– they apparently do not exist at all.

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Victorians on Kindle: The Best!

Monday, April 18th, 2011

I think it’s the linearity– novels before 1980 were all written without the easy of moving sections and seach-and-past.  In  in the case of the Victorians, with their serialized versions before the books, the writers sometimes had to commit to a story line in public before knowing where it was going.

This is the strength and weakness of fast publishing– of all the writers who have an audience calling for their work–they are encouraged, for financial and ego reasons to publish fast.  There is a wonderful energy and exchange with the audience in this (think of Dickens with people writing to beg him to keep a favorite character alive, or today of George R.R. Martin with people howling for the final book of his “Fire and Ice” series to be published already), but also some contorted developments and sloppy writing.

All this to say I read Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South on the Kindle, a free download via the computer from Gutenberg, I think  (I’m not remembering now which books I got from the Kindle store and which ones from Gutenberg Project directly).  Loved the book, and intend to write about it in my review newsletter, but it was truly right on the Kindle:  no need to go back and forth, a simple style  with not a lot to underline and admire– all story all the time.  I’m sorry it’s done.

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Buying on the Cheap for the Kindle

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

I’m still being mostly cheap with the Kindle, because there is a real tendency to hear of a book and go buy it– just what Amazon wants, of course!  Last night I was exploring some of the free sites, especially Gutenberg, and I downloaded the major novels of Mrs. Gaskell, which I’ve read, but am ready to read again. I think downloading to the computer directly from Gutenberg  (and then transfering by wire to the Kindle) may be easier than buying free from Amazon because it’s time consuming to figure out which edition you want on Amazon– some free, some 99 cents, some as much as $12.00.

I finished the final Palliser novel (The Duke’s Children), which was surprisingly cheerful after the heavily dysfunctional relationships of The Prime Minister.   The Duke’s heir Silverbridge  (“Silver”) grows on you:  not overwhelmingly smart, with no real political convictions, making one error in life after another, but lovable and good hearted and once he was in love willing to stick to it!  His sister also sticks to her choice in a love, and there’s another of Trollope’s pathetic woman of power, Mabel Glax, tramelled  by sexism, the class system, and the disaster of turning great gifts to love alone.

It isn’t that I’m not reading contemporary books:  I’m working on a new issue of my newsletter with one unpublished book and a couple from a couple of years ago.  But the fact is, the brand new books are expensive and harder to get on the e-readers.  Let me rephrase, not harder to get, but harder to get free.  I have this feeling I should be able to borrow, as in the library, and there seems to be some of that developing– Amazon has some books you can borrow for two weeks, if the owners allow  (I think I’m getting this right) but they can only be borrowed once.  There’s something all wrong about this– I’m still having trouble with the ethics of all this and the logistics.  The ethics of copyright is fascinating and annoying:  I just read somewhere that the entire twentieth century’s output of  books– at least after 1920–  is going to be dead to e-books unless the publishers and authors get their heads straight and give up the infinite copyrights.  Easy for me to say, with how little I make in royalties.

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More Joy of Victorians!

Sunday, February 20th, 2011

This is beginning to sound like a theme.  So I finally got the Kindle, after months of  agonizing over corporate misdeeds and which device had access to the most books, sold in the end, by the lightness and visual neutrality. It pops into my bag with almost no added weight. I can lie in bed and hold it over my head as I read (try that with a three pound hard cover novel). On the train, if I don’t feel like using glasses, I can make the type larger. There are no colors, no music (although you can have the text read aloud if you really want it).   I am  gradually downloading for FREE all my favorite Victorians and more. A couple of nights ago I got the free versions of all the major Jane Austen novels. I’ve got all of George Eliot except Theophrastus Such. I have all six Trollope Palliser novels (that would be Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke’s Children.) and my favorite E.M. Forster (Howard’s End and A Passage to India.). Indeed, a huge per centage of literature that is out of copyright is available to download free on the Kindle (or any other electronic reader).

Some readers might  say, Well I have all of the Victorians in my local library, or I have an omnibus edition of George Eliot sitting on my shelf right now. To which I say, Great, so do I, but can you carry it all with you on the commuter train in to New York? In your bag for vacation?

So far, as to purchasing books with money, I have bought a George R.R. Martin sword and sorcery, A FEAST FOR CROWS, and now SUTTREE, an  early Cormac McCarthy set in Knoxville, Tennessee back when he was an Appalachian writer, before the border trilogy and BLOOD MERIDIAN. You can, of course, buy many current books for the Kindle, but they aren’t particularly cheap, and you can’t pass them on.

I know, because I tried using my computer backup copy of a free one and a paid one and sending to my brother-in-law who has a Kindle, and he couldn’t.

There’s a rumor going around, however,  that you can get a program or key of some kind to decode these.  If you’re into beating the system, some would say stealing.  Why does the idea of opening a book I own so a friend can read it not feel like stealing to me?

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Joy of George Eliot

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

I’ve now got all (I think) of George Eliot’s fiction on the Kindle.  This probably says a lot about my prehistoric taste in literature.  I just read “Brother Jacob” and “The Lifted Veil,” probably the only fiction of hers I’d never read before.  Often grouped together because of length (short) although “The Lifted Veil” was written between Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss .

“The Lifted Veil” is a kind of Henry James-in-his-supernatural mode story with a touch of Poe, very overwrought and with a totally bizarre medical experiment in the end that causes a corpse to Tell All– still, there were parts that completely gripped me, the strnage passive narrator who sees too much and is involved in a truly rotten marriage– which I’m beginning to think is the great  Victorian subject– being caught in a relationship with the wrong person and being unable to get out of it.

I’m reading a little in Haight’s bio of her, too, the parts I didn’t pay much attention to like her first time alone, in Geneva, in pensiones, a thirty year old mademoiselle, not beautiful (even the drawings of her barely manage to flatter– the big hooter, the half-blind eyes, the pendulous lower lip).  Thank God for George Lewes making her happy and thus Middlemarch and The Mill and Adam and Daniel and Gwendolyn and all the rest.

“Brother Jacob” is a  parable, unpleasant family thief found out by his enormous pitchfork toting retarded brother.

I  LOVE getting these free and reading them in the calm gray linear environment of the Kindle.

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I took it to New York today, and I was not alone…..

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

… no indeedy.  There were Kindles all over NJ Transit, and a Nook beside me on the M4 bus going up Madison Avenue.  The Nook  was the new one with a bright orange book style cover, but the owner was reading what appeared to be shelter magazines.  We Kindlers  (Kindle-eers?) are definitely reading text.

We had a big discussion of the Kindle at my Writers’ Group.  One of our members, who is in her ninth decade, asked me how to made the letter size larger, and I showed her.  She has already read three books on it– which proves to me that it is an intuitive device.  You can download books and read them perfectly efficiently without the manual.

I used large size letters on the train so I wouldn’t have to wear my glasses.  I think I got less seasick that way.

One of our members was  offended by the grayness of the screen.  I’m okay with that, the transparency of it, although I’ll miss covers and ding bat illustrations to rest the eye.  I almost good with the idea of being able to own fewer  books.

I’m going for free books so far, but I’m thinking about some of the $.99 deals for, say, poetry I might dip into occasionally  (whereas I won’t be carrying Leaves of Grass with me, along with other books.)

I’m reading some P.G. Wodehouse, brand new to me, and mostly hilarious, totally on the surface, of course, but the play of that stupid twenties or thirties slag is delightful.

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