Tag Archives: books

The Worst Science Fiction Series EVAR.

Sorry for things still running at reduced capacity here at Futurismic, but I’ve rather a lot on my plate right now, and that looks to continue until after Easter at the earliest (though I’m busy over Easter weekend because of Eastercon, which is a nice sort of busy by comparison to the rest).

But I don’t want y’all to get bored, so I’m going to do my best to do a few posts a day just pointing to interesting stuff elsewhere… skipping my usual discursive and directionless rambles, in other words! So try this one for size: after seeing some other website list Asimov’s Foundation series as the pinnacle of written science fiction, Ian Sales has compiled a retaliatory list of the ten worst science fiction book series, books “whose label as science fiction embarrasses me, whose continuing popularity puzzles me, and whose fans I feel deserve a smack upside the head with a very large and nail-studded cluebat.”

I still hold a soft spot for the Pern novels (as they were my road-to-Damascus sf texts as a child), but I’m not ashamed to agree with a lot of Ian’s other selections. What about you? Which of Ian’s picks would you rescue from the sin-bin, and which series would you add to the list?

POD = DOA?

Via Chairman Bruce, a piece at The Economist about the rise of print-on-demand publishing:

Despite all its advantages, POD is unlikely to take over the world. This is because in contrast to digital printing, whose per-unit costs stay pretty much the same, traditional offset printing exhibits strong economies of scale. As long as you have bestsellers with hundreds of thousands of copies, on-demand printing is not going to displace the conventional sort, says David Davis of InterQuest. Then there is regulation. In some countries, such as China, a licence is needed to publish books; others, such as Germany and France, have price controls for books.

All this makes it difficult to predict POD’s impact on publishing’s supply chain, which is already in upheaval, mainly because of the internet. Readers should benefit from the greater variety. More authors will get published, for instance, but there will also be more competition. Publishers may save money, but they may also lose their role as gatekeepers. The losers are easier to determine: used-book sellers, logistics firms and, of course, the makers of offset-printing equipment. […].

Some believe POD could spur demand for books. Dane Neller, the boss of On Demand Books, which makes the Espresso, wants to put one wherever people might feel the urge to read, from cruise ships to train stations. But he gets most excited when talking about taking the devices to poor countries. “The potential to democratise knowledge,” he says, “is huge.”

I’ll leave the incisive commentary to Bruce Sterling, as he’s umpteen times better at it than I am:

Who really NEEDS print-on-demand books? Guys outside the distribution chain. And where do THEY live, one wonders. Oh wait, look. Here at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Those young guys with the cellphones. About a billion of ‘em.

I think it’s interesting to consider the potential effects of POD technology on a niche market like science fiction (or queer lit, or Lovecraftian retrohorror, or [insert small-volume-yet-international-and-surprisingly-tenacious literary scene here]), though, because it’s easier for a scene of that size to pick up and take over the gatekeeper mechanisms that POD would corrode.Whether they’d do as good a job is, of course, a matter for lively and passionate debate… 🙂

However, the caveat here is that I don’t understand the publishing business as an insider, and that we could probably all do with reading Charlie Stross’s ongoing Common Misconceptions about Publishing series (assuming you haven’t already, natch – I need to scrape together an hour or two to sit down and take notes while going through ’em in detail).

That said, I’m not sure that inside knowledge can effectively counter the suggestion that external technological and/or economic forces might completely up-end an entire industry, and render it unrecognisable (or at least unprofitable) in short order. If you’ve got informed input (or a good question!) please pipe up below and share it with us. 🙂

How publishers can exploit “virtual currencies”

Given that publishing economics are pretty topical at the moment, this video embedded in this post from GalleyCat last Thursday seems either alarmingly prescient or laughably silly, depending on your viewpoint.

Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: those mind-numbingly infuriating and spammy Farmville games your friends play on Facebook are surprisingly good at generating income for their creators, so publishers should take a leaf from the same book to spice up their own online offerings. The theory does come from the president of a company called Orca which specialises in developing virtual currencies for corporations, so a certain bias in favour of the idea is to be expected…

Here’s an excerpt (which I’ve excerpted in turn from GalleyCat’s post – yay, lazyweb!):

“They convert [virtual currencies] at prices that are not easily divided–one dollar gives you 33 credits [for example] … People don’t necessarily think, ‘it cost me 42-cents to send my friend a virtual beer.’ I think when the publishing industry starts thinking about how they chunk up content–whether it be articles or chapters–it shouldn’t be a debate of whether an article is worth one dollar or three dollars. An article should cost 43 credits.”

My immediate instinct is that this idea stinks, though that’s probably due to my kneejerk loathing of Farmville, Mafia Wars et al; maybe there’ll be a way to graft virtual currencies onto the publishing ecosystem without introducing the intrusive “social” aspects (read as “spamming”) and underhand pricing structures that seem to inform such games, which I suspect wouldn’t gel well with the book-buying demographic. But then again, if you get rid of those aspects of the system, you’ll probably never make a dime with it… so it’s back to the drawing board, I guess.

Amazon, ebooks and piracy – tipping points ahoy?

Sticking with the piracy theme for a moment (yeah, I know, so out of character, right?), here’s an article at TechRadar that features an interview with one George Walkley, head of digital developments for publishers Hachette UK, talking about ways in which the publishing industry has tried to learn from the spectacular blunders and ostrich impressions of the music recording industry – the issue of file format compatibility, for instance. [image by Eirik Newth]

Says Gary Marshall the journalist:

Digital downloads weren’t cheaper than CDs, and for now at least ebooks probably won’t be cheaper than print. That’s partly because most of the costs apply whether you publish a book on paper or on an iPhone, and it’s partly because of tax: “printed matter” books are zero rated for VAT, whereas electronic ones have to charge the full 17.5%.

It’s a weird anomaly, and if we were in the book business we’d be lobbying Alistair Darling like crazy to get electronic books treated the same as printed ones.

The challenge for publishing is to avoid being seen as greedy. In music, the debate quickly became characterised as The Man versus The Kids, where The Man was Bono, his celebrity mates and their filthy rich record companies.

In reality, most musicians are struggling to pay the rent, but that’s not what the average file sharer thinks.

This is very true… as is the article’s revelation that the book-buyer demographic and the music pirate demographic are very very different. But as a side note, I’d point out that almost all musicians (and, I suspect, the vast majority of novelists) have been struggling to pay the rent for decades, and that the exceptions to that norm – the Bonos and McCartneys and Rowlings of the world – have been enthroned on their disproportionate mountains of cash by the same business models that are now collapsing under the pressure of filesharing.

I’d even go so far as to say that the business models in question have gone some distance toward ensuring that the smaller names in music and writing can’t make a reasonable living wage at it; if there’s [x] amount of money sloshing round in the economy that people are willing to spend on entertainment, then the way that money is divided up between the entertainers is controlled by the distribution and publicity systems of the industries that publish them.

The utopian promise of The Long Tail is that the more obscure artists will have a better chance of being discovered by readers or listeners who will enjoy (and hence purchase) their work, while the megastars will wane to a more modest brightness as the monopoly control their publishers had over the formerly-limited channels of publicity and sales frontage is eroded. Whether that utopia arrives or not remains to be seen; personally, I think we’re headed in that direction, but it will take hard work from the publishers to avoid creating the black-market demand that buried the big record labels. I want to see the artists I enjoy get paid, and I’m happy to pay them… but the price has to be right, as does the share that goes to the creator. Walkley is wise to this, it seems:

“Copyright infringement cannot be prevented altogether, only reduced,” he says. Speaking personally, he says he’d like to see action against the most egregious offenders – but he also says that the key is to give consumers what they want.

“One of the most important things we can do is to make the purchase of legitimate ebooks as easy and as convenient as possible and produce a broad range of titles in digital formats,” Walkley says. It’s a lesson that took the music industry more than a decade to learn.

Amen. And right on the tail of that article comes an announcement from Amazon, wherein they try to sweeten the deal on Kindle-based ebook pricing for publishers:

Amazon.com […] today announced details of a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell. For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option. This new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010.

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

It’s a generous offer, but it looks to me like Amazon wants to be the iTunes of books – which is an understandable business goal, certainly, but hinges on locking publishers and consumers alike into one proprietary and intrinsically limited hardware platform. I suspect that once Steve Jobs has delivered his next sermon to the Fapple faithful, and the much-vaunted Tablet paves the way for cheaper and more open equivalent hardware, the range of affordable and open devices upon which ebooks can be read comfortably will mushroom.

Will the publishers be ready with the right formats at the right price? Will the book-buying demographic be more willing to compromise than the BitTorrent kids? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

[ Full disclosure: I have done freelance work for Hachette UK, and George Walkley is an acquaintance of mine. ]