Sillybean
Amazon is not negotiating lower ebook prices for your benefit
On Friday, Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books, including Tor SF, Minotaur mysteries, and several other things I buy a lot. It’s a bullying move in a heated negotiation over how ebooks are sold.
Before you say, “Go Amazon! Fight those publishers and their $15 ebooks!” you need to understand a little bit more about how publishing works. Go read what Tobias Buckell, Charles Stross, and Jay Lake and Cory Doctorow have to say about it. Are they biased? Well, yeah, they’re all Tor authors, so they’re pretty pissed. At the same time, they’re ebook consumers, and they have a pretty well-balanced understanding of the situation.
Do not assume that because they’re negotiating for a lower fixed price, Amazon is on your side. Macmillan is trying to introduce variable pricing, where books are more expensive when they first come out and then get cheaper than Amazon’s fixed price — just like hardcover/paperback works now. In fighting this, Amazon is positioning itself more like a publishing subcontractor and less like a bookstore. The problem for Macmillan (and every other major publisher) is that the money it makes on those initially-more-expensive books is what allows it to a) stay in business, and b) take risks on new or unknown authors. Publishing operates on a razor-thin margin, and publishers know damn well that paper printed books are going away. They have to work out an ebook model that doesn’t slice off the profitable part of their business. Amazon’s model does.
Update: Amazon has folded. Their letter is strangely worded. I like Laura Anne Gilman’s response.
Update 2: Mary Robinette Kowal hilariously skewers the Amazon letter, and Scott Westerfeld has a remarkably sane overview of the situation.
Easier internal links for WordPress
Last week I got into a conversation with my friend Fletcher about linking to internal pages in WordPress. To wit, it could be a lot easier. Wiki-style links would be better than nothing, but personally I hate having to remember special codes for things. Still, WordPress’s shortcode API does make this relatively easy to accomplish, and sure enough, someone had already done more or less what I wanted. His shortcodes look like this:
[link pagename="My Example Page"]
That wasn’t quite right, though. I wanted to use slugs instead of proper names, and include IDs, and be able to link to things other than posts and pages. So I’ve taken it a little further:
(Later this week I’ll probably add custom taxonomy support, now that I’ve sussed out how that works.)
So, mission accomplished… sort of. Fletcher would like something shorter, but we’re constrained by the API. We can’t have [link 2130], which would have been my first choice.
How could this be better? I’m thinking of adding a button to the visual editor toolbar that would pop up and prompt you for the ID or slug. If I can figure out how to put an auto-suggesting search box in that popup, I will. The HTML editor is trickier… I know I could put a button in for each of the various formats, but that’s a lot of buttons. I’m not sure if the quicktag popups support more than one input field. Suggestions welcome!
Bloomsbury caught whitewashing, AGAIN
Seriously, you’d think they could have learned a lesson from last time, but no.
So really, publishers, if you’re so convinced that a book with a dark-skinned heroine won’t sell unless readers are tricked into thinking she’s white, then just be honest about all of it — admit that you don’t want to risk publishing books about characters of color. Admit that white people are the only audience you really care about. Admit that you don’t give a tiny rat’s ass about that adolescent girl walking through a bookstore, trying to find a story about someone who looks like her and learning — probably for the umpteenth time that day — that only white people can be pretty or interesting.
UPDATE: They’re changing the jacket, even though the book was already in stores.
Ikea hack: keyboard drawer for Mikael desk
Ever wanted a keyboard drawer for your Mikael desk? If you happen to have an old set of Magiker bridge shelves lying around, you’re golden.
While I was documenting the hack, I decided to photograph the rest of my study. If you like to ogle other people’s bookshelves, or you just like brightly-colored workspaces, check out the Flickr set.
Hastings vs. Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon: the problem with buying books locally
Steven Brust’s Iorich comes out today. I would like to buy a copy. I’ve long been in the habit of tracking forthcoming books with a (private) Amazon wish list, then lumping together the ones that come out around the same time into one purchase, thus scoring big discounts and free shipping. However, this also leads to a nasty habit of buying books I don’t really need just to hit the $25 free shipping threshold. Since by now I own hundreds of books I haven’t read yet — I’m also a binge shopper at used book stores — I’m trying to scale back this year. There are no other books coming out this month that I must have immediately, so I thought I’d just pick up Iorich at a local bookstore. Where I live, that means shopping at Hastings (we have two) or Barnes & Noble. (Target and Wal-mart might work for mega-bestsellers, but not for most of the authors I follow.)
Hastings, south side
First stop, the Hastings closer to campus. I’m on my lunch break, and for once the book manager has already shelved all the new releases. (He’s often the only one working the book section, and if he gets a phone call, the shelving might not get done until dinnertime.) However, there’s no Iorich on the new release table or the SF shelf. I know what that means — Hastings and I have done this dance before — but I’m acquainted with the book manager, and when he says hi, I pause and ask him about the book. He looks it up, says “hmm,” and we learn that there’s one copy in transit and two more on backorder. When it does arrive, it will not be discounted, even though Jhegaala was heavily discounted in this store when it came out last year.
Now, there are two things you have to know about Hastings’ inventory system. The first is that “in transit” is a vague term. It’s not like a UPS package that gets tracked every time the truck stops. The book could arrive this afternoon or two weeks from now. There’s no way of knowing. The second is that Hastings, unlike every other bookseller I have ever encountered, assigns an internal release date rather than using the publishers’ — and it’s the last day of the month. Therefore I know — and you know, and anyone else who’s looked at Amazon or a publisher’s catalog knows — that Iorich is out today, but as far as Hastings’ computer is concerned, it will be released January 31. Even though the book is on the truck already. And even though all the really big bestsellers released today are indeed on the new release table, right on time.
I don’t get it either.
Barnes & Noble
They do have at least one copy — in a box in the back, buried under a number of other boxes, which they don’t plan to unpack today. (It’s about 5:45.) Would I like them to call me when they locate the book?
I would not. After all, maybe I’ll get lucky at the other Hastings…
Hastings, north side
Second verse, same as the first. At least the person at the book counter was friendly; for some reason, I usually get very grumpy people at this store.
Amazon
Discounted to $16.49 and shipping immediately. Even if I suck it up and pay the $3.99 for shipping rather than finding another random book to buy, I’m still saving $5 — and another trip to Barnes & Noble later this week.
I have an Amazon gift card burning a hole in my pocket, so I’ll give you three guesses what happened next.
To Sum Up
That’s why I stopped shopping locally in the first place. If I’m looking for a romance paperback, I can usually find it. Anything else, especially a new release, and it’s going to be a hassle: they don’t have it, or they don’t know whether they have it, and half the time I get a clerk who’s incapable of looking it up, even if I’ve spelled the author’s full name and provided an ISBN. Honestly!
