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.

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….

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.

I also like NORTH AND SOUTH’s Mr. Rochester effect, which is that the powerful, passionate man clearly meant to be Margaret’s mate, must be brought down from his arrogant high horse before the match can be made. Gaskell doesn’t blind her Mr. Thornton as her friend Charlotte Brontë did to her Mr. Rochester, but Gaskell does put him in dire financial straits, and then (take that, Mr. Captain of Industry!) she allows Margaret to inherit just enough wealth to help him. Only then can they meet as equals in marriage.

There’s one wonderfully melodramatic but vivid scene when Margaret challenges Thornton to go face the crowd of angry strikers in person, and then, when the crowd gets nasty, she goes herself and stands between him and them. In fact, in her desire to protect him, she throws her arms around his neck. Thornton’s reaction (this part feels so right) is actually physical pleasure and a conviction that the young woman obviously is in love with him if she would embrace him in public. He then fantasizes about her touch for weeks– it’s pretty hot stuff for the nineteenth century and a novelist who is a pastor’s wife.

Somewhat less satisfying, but not bad, is her portrait of a “good” union man, Nicholas Higgins, who teaches Thornton a few things, but also has to learn a few. Thornton, who is in fact a former worker who really did accumulate his own capital, sits down with Higgins, and they come up with some ways of working together. It rejects the all-worker union, but at least gives the privilege to a kind of mutuality.

One note about an element of all Mrs. Gaskell’s work that 21st century readers may mistake for melodrama is how characters drop like flies– they die of consumption, of apoplexy, of heart disease and some unnamed female complaint, probably a cancer– but to Gaskell’s mind, death of people in their fifties and sixties is perfectly normal, as is consumption taking a girl of nineteen or twenty. Think, in fact, of the Brontë siblings: two dead of Tuberculosis before 30, the brother of alcoholism (probably) even earlier, and Charlotte while pregnant at the age of 38.

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.

There’s a lot of confusion right now among technology, profit taking, ownership, books as physical objects and books as reading experiences.

Next move, I read some more online and discoverd the existes of Calibre, an open source software that will translate e-pub or whatever for kindle (or just about anything to anything, actually).  You are supposed to be able to have books emailed to your Kindle account, but why?  It also loads directly to the device if attached to the computer, so I’ve translated my first book (just Calibre’s handbook) and downloaded.  Cool.
This is all new and happening fast.

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.

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?

“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.