We’ve had years of foot-dragging and protests that ‘no-one wants to read from a screen, anyway‘, but all of a sudden (thanks partly to a Zeitgeist gizmo and an economic slump, perhaps), publishers are looking afresh at the ebook. [image by henribergius]
I mentioned Pan Macmillan’s new iPhone offer the other week, but it looks as if they’re not the only publishing house realising that, actually, people will pay for accessibility and convenience after all. Who knew?
Hey, you – yeah, you with the iPhone. Wanna do something more interesting than pretend to check your mail while you’re on the bus? Genre publishers Pan Macmillan obviously think you do, and have taken the remarkably forward-looking choice of making some of their science fiction and fantasy ebook selection available for the Stanza reader software. [image by William Hook]
At the moment you still have to download the original ebook to your Stanza desktop app and transfer it across, and you can only get an excerpt rather than the whole thing, but apparently the ability to buy direct from your iPhone is in the pipeline. I’ve been waiting to see how the big houses would respond to Oprah’s backing of the Kindle – maybe we’re seeing the first shot in a hardware war yet to come?
The headline pretty much says it all, really, but in case you’d not heard it elsewhere it appears that the wranglings between Google and the publishing companies over the company’s Book Search project have finally been settled. Once the plan has been stamped off by a federal judge, the Big G will build an independent ‘Book Rights Registry’ to monitor copyright matters, and we’ll have some new ways of getting access to old or obscure books without leaving the comfort of our swivel chairs. [image by Thomas Hawk]
What’s interesting is that there was apparently a good chance of Google actually winning the case had it gone to court… and it’s not quite the bed of roses for the publishers as it might initially seem, as Google’s now nicely placed to play a very influential role in the future of publishing.
A disturbing number of writers are apparently being effectively blacklisted by bookstore chains, even though some of these writers’ books sell pretty well. Gregory Frost witnessed this first-hand when good sales and repeat printings for his novel Shadowbridge weren’t enough to induce a U.S. chain to stock the sequel, Lord Tophet (actually the second half of what should have been one long single volume, but that’s another story). Greg rises above the level of rant to explore why this might be so:
The publisher is required by its owner to turn out bestsellers with assembly line regularity. The dying megastores need the extra income at the same time that they have begun to winnow other titles by those already handicapped authors. In the frenzy of rewards and discounts and product placement, the entire industry has completely lost sight of what it once was in business to provide: Good books. We the readers are the ultimate losers in this rigged game.
My solution is no different than all the writers who’ve shouted from the battlements before me: Buy your books from independent bookstores; the ones that have survived the onslaught, the ones that we hope will arise to fill the gap.
Writers pre-published and otherwise, of course, have an even better motive to support indies. The chains are not our friends. They limit your choices — and your purchases pour money into a dying business model anyway. Whatever chains may be today, they are not the future.
[In my next life, I’d like to be a cat in a bookstore by Glynnis Ritchie]
In addition to the worry that their favourite author or franchise might try suing them for breach of copyright and intellectual property theft, UK writers of the more, ah, racey forms of fan-fiction have a new concern – being charged under the Obscene Publications laws.
The fan-fic in question is a kind of splatter-core horror-porn tribute to a British girl band who can’t sing in tune without digital processing, and Darryn Walker’s trial will be the first prosecution of written material under the relevant laws in twenty years. If the action against Walker is successful, it’s very bad news for slash fiction writers. [via TechDirt]