| Author | Message | ||
     Colin Leslie (Blackabyss) Username: Blackabyss Registered: 02-2010 Posted From: 86.165.152.107 |
A friend was showing me the gory innards of usenet, the underground side of file sharing today. Among the categories can be found alt.binaries.e-books. A quick search brought up thousands of horror titles available for instant/free download including several of Ramsey's. Whatever the debate on ebooks this has to be a concern, doesn't it? | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
The world is going to have to come to terms with this basic fact: Whatever can be digitized, cannot be controlled. This is not advocation, this is a WARNING. And until everyone gets their heads out of the sands and la-dee-dah-ing with the fingers in the ears about it, hoping it will all just go away, like (sorry, Des) that entire other thread seems to hope... while people ignore and hope and pray, real damage is being done every day, irreparable damage.... Why is it "repair," and "repairable," but then "irreparable" and not "irrepairable" -- http://youtu.be/SSUXXzN26zg | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.146.177 |
I've just made 'that entire other thread' irreparable. This thread is far more important. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.146.177 |
Having googled alt.binaries.e-books, it just seems to me we are allowing the centuries-old book we've all loved since childhood to be fast degraded and pirated... | ||
| Colin Leslie (Blackabyss) Username: Blackabyss Registered: 02-2010 Posted From: 86.165.152.107 |
I presume this could just as easily have happened with people scanning books but certainly the demand is likely to be increasing as ebook readers become more widely used. If anyone wants a scare try using this link http://binsearch.info/ to search for things, it's amazing how much is available. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.146.177 |
Thanks, Colin. I put in 'grin of the dark' and there was one ebook result. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Which is just what those of us on that other thread who fear for the future of "real" books have been saying, surely? This is why I have most certainly made a vow with myself (and now to you guys) NOT to start buying ebooks (unless it gets to the point where paper books are no more  ). This situation of piracy is just what has happened in music, and it's obviously now happening in literature too. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.118.75.42 |
Interesting. Does this work for e-book readers only or can one download stuff on one's computer as well? I'm not clear how it works. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
Quick question before this thread gets as hysterical as the last: how many of you have bought second-hand books? Because whether you pirate the book or buy it second-hand the author sees the same amount: sweet F.A. And I'd wager that, despite this digital age, there are still more people buying second-hand books than there are pirating them. And that's arguably as damaging to the production of 'real' books as e-books ever will be. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.146.177 |
I agree, John, but a book is containable for what it is. Like we all can sell or buy a second-hand kettle. But an ebook is not containable as an artefact like that. It is immeasurably disseminatable illegally. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I know me, I go out looking for second-hand books mostly because they're out of print! So I have no choice! | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.14.90 |
John, collecting second-hand books is a fundamental part of being a reader, and a fundamental part of what happens to real books over time. I owned hundreds of second-hand books before I owned more than a dozen new ones. I educated myself in genre history through second-hand books. It's not piracy, it's an aspect of literary culture. Scanning a text into a computer and making it available online is not the same as selling second-hand books, because it does not involve publication. It does not use the resource of published books, it bastardises and supplants them. No writer has a problem with second-hand booksellers, but this kind of digital buggerfuckshit is intolerable. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.144.33.232 |
>>>this kind of digital buggerfuckshit is intolerable.  Well said Mr Lane. you do have a way with words... | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
You guys have just noticed this? Wow. This kind of thing has been going on for years. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
What, Mr. Lane's wordsmithery? What's quaint are those warnings - oh hell, it's not that quaint - it's in this very book here, Wolfe's THE KNIGHT (as an example), printed long long ago in... 2005. "NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware the book is stolen property. It was reported as 'unsold and destroyed' to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this 'stripped book.' " Was this really a big problem ever?! Geez, I'll be so many people would love to trade that one for the one now... and coming.... | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.127.208 |
I first saw a a book available (illegally) for download in 1994, it's only the scale of this that's any different. If you don't like the idea of ebooks, don't use them. It's a waste of good reading time posting here about how much you hate them and how you'll never ever use them - fine, don't. I've tried them and can't say I hugely enjoy the experience, and will buy print books rather than electronic ones where I can, but they're here, so whatever is said here will not make the slightest difference. The music industry had a problem because they kept their collective heads in the sand regarding new technologies and took much to long to embrace new possibilities rather than try to fight them using litigation. Plus, has anyone here not recorded music for a friend onto cassette or CD, or loaned a book to someone? The original creator is losing out if you have done so. If the printed book stopped tomorrow there are more than enough still in existence to keep all of us happy. As I say, I'm not a fan of ebooks; I've bought just two - a collection by Simon Kurt Unsworth and Ill At Ease, by Mark West, Neil Williams and Stephen Bacon, but I'm happy to support them in their endevours. Sorry for the rambling post but it's 4.30 am and I'm off abroad for the weekend in fifteen minutes - I need some sleep! | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.127.208 |
"too"... "endeavours"... | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.127.208 |
I've found a plus side to ebeeks too - our local area stopped its mobile service some time ago due to cuts - however, they've now introduced an ebook lending service which I tried the other day ( and mentioned on Facebook, horrifying some folk) - I think it's a wonderful idea which allows housebound folk with access to a computer to borrow a fair range of books without leaving the house. | ||
| Colin Leslie (Blackabyss) Username: Blackabyss Registered: 02-2010 Posted From: 86.165.152.107 |
Hubert - Yes you can download these books and read them on a pc or print them out if you want. Zed - I know this has been going on for years but the availability of ebook readers has created a much larger demand. All - It seems surprising that folks are not worried by this. The music industry now survives largely through income from concerts now that music sales have declined so much. I don't see that authors and publishers have that option. This wasn't meant as an anti- ebook post, i would say something if i saw somebody filling their pockets in Waterstones. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Weirdly, I've found that many public-domain e-books - like, go to google, the facsimiles of books printed a hundred or more years ago - anyway, the what seems now to be really old-fashioned formatting? Big words in little blocks crammed down the center of the page? e.g., this random old tome by Daniel DeFoe: http://books.google.com/books?id=Um9bAAAAQAAJ&dq=Daniel%20Defoe&pg=PA15#v=onepag e&q&f=false Anyway, these old old laboriously-printed books end up ironically being REAL easy on the eyes, reading it on my cell phone of all things! With a good cell phone e-reader, like the best of the lot I've found so far, Aldiko - because Nook, Kindle, and even Google Books (!) all won't read PD pdfs directly downloaded from google, making thousands of these PD books still all but unavailable, sadly, and - wait - what's happening - am I turning into a traitor here?... | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.52.77 |
As long as no-one begins tampering with a text because it is deemed too long or controversial, I can live with it. Just. But I fear those 'digests of digests of digests' predicted by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 are upon us. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Colin - all writers are worried about book piracy. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.19.19 |
"You guys have just noticed this? Wow. This kind of thing has been going on for years." I know, Zed – Stan Nicholls was protesting about this more than five years ago. I'd just naively assumed that since there are so many technical geniuses around, they would have found a way of stopping it – if not by preventing it directly then by catching and jailing those responsible. I should have remembered that this is the fucking internet we're talking about, where nobody gives a fucking damn, and stupid ignorant dogshit is the norm. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
It aint just the internet, Joel - nobody gives a fucking damn about anything in the real world, either, and stupid ignorant dogshit is the norm there too. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.146.177 |
Two wrongs don't make a fright. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.152.194.197 |
"...stupid ignorant dogshit is the norm there too." There, not here? Hmm. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Anyway, here's a cat on a trampoline: http://youtu.be/-LcUWDytwRA | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.146.177 |
Coincidentally, this morning I had a google alert for a story of mine appearing here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/65274373/Year-s-Best-Horror-Stories-XVIII-Ed-Karl-Edwa rd-Wagner Is this legal or illegal? | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 49.226.89.45 |
'I should have remembered that this is the fucking internet we're talking about, where nobody gives a fucking damn, and stupid ignorant dogshit is the norm.' There are times that I'd agree with that. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.154.182 |
This reminds me on Konrad Lorenz's observation that 'distance weapons' (eg, guns, rockets) make killing more likely, because the perp doesn't have to look into the whites of the eyes of their victims. The Internet might make fuckwittery more likely, but it's still fuckwits who behave that way. Baby. Bathwater. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.154.182 |
>>>It aint just the internet, Joel - nobody gives a fucking damn about anything in the real world, either, and stupid ignorant dogshit is the norm there too. Do you not think this is an ugly attitude, too, though? I'm not getting at anyone. I just think that taking such a defeatist, ostensibly 'gritty' stance doesn't do anyone any favours. I'm not even sure if it's wholly true, anyway. Nobody gives a damn about anything? I can think of plenty who do about many different things. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.154.182 |
In other words, for me, life is "nasty, brutish and short" only on a Monday and a Friday. The rest of the week is pretty much tolerable, and Saturday can be quite splendid. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.146.177 |
Disregarding the macro-misanthropy tangent, I feel that - as Zed said - all authors worry about piracy. It just seems to me that the ebook culture fast growing up now - with the encouragement of authors - is making that situation potentially worse, through the customer demand and technical facilities it's stimulating. Also, as I think Colin said, authors haven't got 'live concerts' to fall back on (as musicians have had) when the inevitable 'free' digitilisation of their work now gathers pace. | ||
| Karim (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 80.196.50.241 |
For the darkness at noon on this Sunday: http://www.break.com/index/goth-dance-party-music-changed-2148572 | ||
| Colin Leslie (Blackabyss) Username: Blackabyss Registered: 02-2010 Posted From: 86.165.152.107 |
Des, what is even more irritating is the way the book you linked to is plastered in advertising. Clearly someone is making money out of this, just a shame it's not the right people. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
It just seems to me that the ebook culture fast growing up now - with the encouragement of authors - is making that situation potentially worse, through the customer demand and technical facilities it's stimulating. Almost certainly true, Des. Now that most large publishers have backed e-books, they have (perhaps unwittingly, but I don't believe they're that naive) exacerbated the problem. The question is, what are they going to do about it? Increased paperback/hardback prices to subsidise the effects of e-book piracy whilst maintaining the low expected cost of the e-book itself? An increase in paid author events - the promotion of the author as personality? Premium cost 'enhanced' e-books with sound effects/soundtracks etc? (Now who's getting hysterical? And talking to himself...  ) I guess we'll have to wait and see; but I'd hope that the publishing industry has looked at the problems music and film-makers have had with piracy and taken some learnings from them... | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Premium cost 'enhanced' e-books with sound effects/soundtracks etc? (Now who's getting hysterical? And talking to himself... ) You do know, John, these already exist? I've seen it on the iPad, mainly for children. I think it was Peter Rabbit I saw - those famous illustrations, but children can touch them and manipulate them. You touch one thing and move it, but it moves 2D like old pop-up books, "sliding" along the page. Another place you touch, it makes a sound, or leaves fall from a tree, etc. The thing is masterfully done, I must admit. It makes reading to small children an almost Harry Potter-world magical experience. ... and kids are supposed to go from that to mere words on the page?... | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
There, not here? Yes, because I'm, like, posting this on the internet, not, like, in the real world. Hmmm. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.152.212.198 |
Interesting, isn't it? We even call reality "there". Where are we, exactly? | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I called reality there because I was here, online (which is nothing at all like reality; I'm not even me when I'm here). But yes, you're right, it is interesting...the internet is like this conceptual space where we can all act like arseholes all the time. Especially me.  | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.154.182 |
>>>Interesting, isn't it? We even call reality "there". Where are we, exactly? Descartes did this to us. Dualism is woven into latter-day Western thought. As Merleau-Ponty said, "Man is in the world and only in the world does he knows himself." This is what he meant. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I think Tom and Jerry also elucidated the same theory in one of their early cartoons. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Descartes, Merleau-Ponty... why does Gary always have to flaunt his, uh, brain-thinking-stuff, or whatever, around here?... | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.118.77.195 |
... and kids are supposed to go from that to mere words on the page?... Worse, I suspect the concept will be applied to all sorts of other reading as well. I can see it now - in a few more years you will have little holograms popping forth and interacting with other people's little holograms. Imagine what it will be like sitting on the train with a bunch of 'readers' like that. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.154.182 |
The Internet is very interesting in relation to Descartes' philosophy. It would appear, on the surface, that the disembodied consciousness of which he spoke has found its playground. But we must always remember one thing: Descartes was a schizoid unable to relate to anyone directly. Go figure, as Craig would say. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.156.210.82 |
Descartes was a schizoid unable to relate to anyone directly Just like 90% of people who post regularly on the internet, then. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.198 |
Er, yeah. As I said, go figure. Keep up. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.156.210.82 |
I'm so far ahead I'd have to slow down to keep up. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
Quoted from that schizoid internet: "The End of the Book, like the Death of the Author, is the conceptual analogue of the End of the Printed Book. These historical shifts have been concomitant with, and indeed have paved the way for, the advent of electronic hypertext. They signal not simply the demise of the bookmark industry or relief from the dangers of papercuts, but a way of thinking about the way we organize, conceive and imagine the world in which we live. To think of the world not as a Book but as a hypertext is to conceive of it as a heterogeneous, mutable, interactive and open-ended space where meaning is inscribed between signs, between nodes, and between readers, not enclosed between the limits of a front and back cover, or anchored to some conceptual spine called the author." A Schizoid, too, I suppose, as creator of Nemonymous (no by-lines) and instigator of all my published work on-line in 2004 (Weirdmonger Wheel), I should have some sympathy with that type of thought-dreaming? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201109200237.html "Publishers fight book-scanning services over copyrights" | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Interesting. You can get a year in prison for stealing bread or bottled water, but when you steal someone else's work you can get lawyers to defend you on the grounds that it should have been given away. How much longer is this going to be tolerated? The thief complains about the victim's 'haughty attitude'. Does the following sound haughty: Stop stealing you thieving scum or I will knock your teeth down your lying throat? It's time to smash the theft machines. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
"A squeeze on consumer spending in supermarkets and the migration to digital are being blamed for the spectacular falls in sales suffered by many of the UK’s biggest commercial women’s novelists in 2011." http://www.thebookseller.com/news/womens-brands-hard-hit-downturn.html | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.176.169.134 |
It's true that 2nd hand books don't bring the author extra revenue either, but the main difference is in the scale and easy duplication of digital distribution. This being said, book pirates made it possible for me to read a number of uncollected JD Salinger stories, which were published in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, and never collected in proper books (Salinger didn't want that). In the end, I didn't like these stories very much, but it was the only reasonably possible way to find them. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.29.102 |
No, the difference is that second-hand books are entities for which the author was paid, and their further circulation is a positive thing for the author. Digital piracy is THEFT. Every new digital copy the author is not paid for is a crime. Pirated digital copies have no right to exist. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.29.102 |
Tom, I'm a bit puzzled by your observation aboput the Salinger stories. He chose to keep them out of circulation. Your apparent conclusion, after reading them, is that he was right. So how does that justify digital piracy? Are writers not entitled to decide what will happen to their work? | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.176.169.134 |
Joel, I was not justifying digital piracy, I do agree that it is theft. I wanted to say that digital files make the easiness and scale of piracy an order of magnitude bigger. Regarding Salinger, it was the only reasonably feasible way (short of trying to find a copy of the old magazine issue) for me to read his last published story "Hapworth 16, 1924". In fact I came upon the scanned unpublished stories while googling for info about that very story. Back then I was a fan of Salinger (now less so, except for some gems like "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor"), I think it is well understandable for any fan to try and find unread stories. I don't make apologies for that, if I could have bought them in book form I would have. | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.176.169.134 |
> Are writers not entitled to decide what will happen to their work? As an aside, this is worth a thread on its own. In general, my view is that as soon as a work is published, it becomes part of the general culture. Yes, an author can refuse reprints, but ultimately, some time after the author's death it will come into the public domain and then the texts may be made available again anyway. Similarly, Stanley Kubrick effectively took his debut full length movie "Fear and Desire" out of circulation. Since his death it seems that a rare surviving print was shown here and there on festivals. From what I read, it's not nearly as good as his later work yet even so it's interesting to see the artist's first steps. | ||
| Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.209.217 |
And to be fair, if Max Brod had taken that attitude, virtually none of Franz Kafka's work would have survived. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
You know, I've been thinking more about this issue. I was reading those Folio Books adverts on the back pages of the Radio Times. Although I actually despise Folio Books and their lust for customers who take pleasure from reading fiction in childhood-nostalgia editions, I can recognise that the power of fiction is not just in the words. It's in something else that none of us can really explain. | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.10.92 |
This isn't going to be popular but: Digital piracy is not theft. It is not theft in the way that stealing a bottle of water is theft. If I steal your bottle of water the thing I have done wrong is to deprive you of your bottle of water. If I steal your bike, you no longer have your bike. If I digitally pirate your book, you still have your book. You have nothing less than you originally had. I have taken nothing from you. What I have done is breached a monopoly on reproduction of words, granted by government, and broken laws designed by corporations to protect the profits of corporations. Since 1707, the only justification for copyright has been that it promotes creativity by giving a monopoly on revenue from things which an author writes. Intellectual property is not property in the same way as any actual property in the world is. It is not a scarce resource. Those who want it to be, and are invested in presenting it as such, and have meetings with Lord Mandelson on yachts (David Geffen, August 2009, during the drafting of the Digital Economy Act) are those corporations who have controlled the distribution of it, and who hate the idea that creators can now talk directly to their audiences. Authors, musicians can now disseminate their work all around the world without involving a record company, a publisher. The idea of 'intellectual property' is a capitalist invention, to create scarcity where there is none, and to commoditise all that is important in life. (Incidentally, I strongly disagree with the undertone that e-books have been pushed by corporations to make more money. They all - apart from Amazon who had a different business model - recognised them as a threat to their business models and resisted them for as long as possible. Ebooks potentially allow authors to communicate without corporations being able to take their slice. The biggest resistance has been from 'large corporations'. Digital distribution is a progressive, anarchist force, opening the libraries of the world up to all, not a reactionary, corporate one.) Obviously, I'm being provocative. I have never pirated a book. I have bought many legitimate ebooks, and thousands upon thousands of actual books. However, it's always worth remembering that digital piracy is not theft. Intellectual property is not property, and only Disney and Sony want it to be. Anyway, there's my little hand grenade. Just my little bit to show you can be a leftie and still read ebooks with a clear conscience. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Excellent points, Nathaniel. For some reason, two contemporaries of each other come to mind: Shakespeare and Cervantes, both who (traditionally) died the same day. Shakespeare as a businessman didn't care about his written/published work, because he controlled P&D (production and distribution) through the plays he and (later) his company put on, a thriving business that couldn't be pirated. Cervantes by contrast, his DON QUIXOTE as we know it now, was actually two novels, the second half a sequel written a decade later; and written only because writers were pirating his character and creating illicit sequels and adventures based on him (some apparently are quite good, they say), until he stepped in and wrote the sequel that killed him off for good. Cervantes did not control P&D. Cervantes died in penury. Hey, Des? Nathaniel? Everyone else? Over here http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip is a riveting interview - monologue, actually - given by Jaron Lanier (recently profiled btw in The New Yorker) that appeared today, coincidentally (though it looks like recorded last month). His talk weaves in and out of many many subjects, including scifi and the economy and the internet and all things in-between; but some of it's quite apt to what is the discussion here. Jason's entire talk is transcribed right below the video, but I highly recommend just letting this guy's engaging, hypnotizing audio play through for the whole well-worth-it hour's length. Here's a single excerpt, spot-on to the discussion at hand…. When people get nothing from a society, they eventually just riot. And to my mind, that's kind of what's going on on the Internet. Basically, people can expect free stuff from the Internet but they don't expect wealth from the Internet, which to me makes it a failed technology at this point, although I hope it's revivable. I'm sure it is. I'm positive it is. And so when all you can expect is free stuff, you don't respect it, it doesn't offer you enough to give you a social contract. What you can seek on the Internet is you can seek some fine things, you can seek friendship and connection, you can seek reputation and all these things that are always talked about, you just can't seek cash. And it tends to create a lot of vandalism and mob-like behavior. That's what happens in the real world when people feel hopeless, and don't feel that they're getting enough from society. It happens online. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
Whether you agree with Nathaniel's points or not (and I do to some extent), I feel they represent a tangent from the debating point that ebooks are not real books at all and can never convey the mysterious power of fiction properly, for all the reasons given or implied upon this and the other thread. The signs are that Ebooks will largely take over from real books and will do a reasonable job, albeit chaanging teh nature of writing itself as some (on both sides of te argument) have said. But it is a tragedy to some of us that the centuries-old book tradition is being degraded (not by evolution but by sudden technical revolution) with people reading, writing for and publishing ebooks. I don't blame them though. That's the understandable business pressures of a perceived ease of reading and publishing. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.8.175 |
I agree with Nathaniel's points - Microsoft always claim they've lost hundreds of billions of dollars due to software piracy, but the fact is they're assuming every pirated copy of Windows or Office would be replaced by a paid for version if the owners of the illegal copy couldn't get it any other way, which is nonsense - they'd get something else free instead - Microsoft have lost very little, if anything. As for ebooks, well, my foray into the world of local libraries lending out ebooks has failed dismally, as the book I downloaded had to be 'returned' within 14 days and it automatically got deleted from my iPad after those 14 days were up, without me having read any of it - too many paper books to be read... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
As to one of Craig's points that to be free is to be under-valued, will Ebooks, by their very nature, tend to become Freebooks when compared to Treebooks that, by their very nature, resist being under-valued more easily? | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.55.170 |
my foray into the world of local libraries lending out ebooks has failed dismally, as the book I downloaded had to be 'returned' within 14 days and it automatically got deleted from my iPad after those 14 days  Sorry about that, Mick | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.8.175 |
 I may try to get it again, though - it was a collection of crime short stories that looked interesting! | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
An author's copyright control over their work represents their only property, the only way they have of securing income and ensuring that they are PAID for the work they have done. To say that copyright protection is a corporate invention that should be swept away by digital liberation is like saying that wage agreements are a corporate invention and workers should expect to receive whatever the market feels like paying them at any moment. Would you appreciate coming to the end of the month and being told "Sorry mate, your salary has flown out the window, that's freedom for you?" Digital piracy does not represent an anarchic revolution against capitalism, it represents the triumph of deregulated capitalist greed over those weak safeguards that writers, through generations of struggle, have managed to secure against exploitation and theft. The deregulation of copyright mirrors the current vicious deregulation of employment, destroying workers' lives in the name of 'freedom' for the spivs and gangsters of the capitalist class. For anyone working in a creative medium, being told that intellectual copyright is not real is like being told that your work has no value and you have no rights over whether or not you are paid. That's like a boot smashing in your face. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
If intellectual property means nothing, why are so many people up in arms against David Boyer? Theft is theft. Simple as that. Theft of your words and ideas is as bad as (if not emotionally worse than) having, say, your sat nav nicked out of your car. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
Although Joel has points, Nathaniel has (Devil's Advocate?) points, too. Stolen water - the water is unique. If it is the only water available in your vicinity, then it's now gone to someone else and you have no water. Text is words. We all use the same words, except in a different order. When does plagiarism become plagiarism and when does it become a slightly altered recycling of the same words available to us all? If Ebooks allow a specific text of words more easily to circulate and re-circulate, then it is arguable they will assist plagiarism and blur the edges of re-cycling, as is shown by Colin's original posts on this thread. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.8.175 |
I think that's been an issue with schoolkids doing their homework. Copy'n'paste must never have seemed so inviting. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Also playing Devil's Advocate, doesn't a certain perversity in copyright control eventually come into play, given enough time and space?... Public domain laws have changed a lot mostly because of Disney, which to save Mickey Mouse from being printed onto a T-shirt in someone's home in Kansas, keeps pushing the amount of time past the death of the creator that's required until PD kicks in. Highly paid lobbyists from Disney accomplish this. Does the law, solely because of their lobbying, then become sacrosanct? Does 50 years becoming 75 years post-death of the creator, suddenly become - like Roman Catholic "revealed truths" - the bedrock hidden fairness that was there all along, that no one saw before? Isn't there something achingly wrong in the old purchasing of "all rights" that used to take place with short stories? So that an August Derleth could claim, erroneously, he possessed sole control of Lovecraft's writings, long after he was dead - and falsely? I'm not even sure this system is in place anymore (?), but if it is, the law then, is unjust; and whenever it was in place, it was unjust. Thank god there are some copyright infringers sometimes, egregious law-breakers: for one, we wouldn't have Nosferatu anymore, if some people respected the law too much....  <---Devil man here said all this | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Also, does time wallpaper over fairness? The courts found at the time, and anyone would agree, that Nosferatu was a blatant rip-off of Stoker's DRACULA. The courts were right, to order the film, produced a mere 10 years after Bram's death, to be collected and destroyed. Stoker's widow was "struggling financially" at the time (according to Wikipedia), and for Murnau & Co. to just wholesale steal Stoker's creation and create a film from it like that.... It wasn't fair to Hamilton Deane, who entered into a contract with her to produce a stage-play; or Horace Liveright, who purchased rights to produce it on the stage in America. Something wrong, something wrong beyond question, occurred here ( 's asking)... so is it all okay now, years later, just because all of you feel like it's okay, to go ahead and own a copy and watch Nosferatu? What's wrong apparently has a time-limit, and that's determined by the whims of a populace. But wouldn't it be more correct, better, juster, to never lay eyes on the film at all, and/or burn copies as the court ordered wherever you find them? Like right there even, in the $1 bin at Wal-Mart? To approve of Nosferatu's existence - isn't it to now say, as much: there are no copyright rules at all? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Did Michael Jackson still own the Copyright to all the Beatles songs when he died or did he sell that to pay for the court cases? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
>>>"We all use the same words, except in a different order." that's a load of discombobulated soapytitwank. There is a Fry and Laurie sketch that deals roughly with Des's statement which I'll try to find and paste here when I get home. | ||
| Colin Leslie (Blackabyss) Username: Blackabyss Registered: 02-2010 Posted From: 86.138.87.138 |
Sorry Nathaniel but I disagree. Although I found myself nodding to your points and even did a Citizen Smith power salute at the notion of all those internet freedom fighters you surely can't argue that an artist has less right to be paid for his work than a car salesman. Yes we need to fight the corporate blunderbuss but I would argue that this is what writers are now doing through the medium of selfpublishing. As that technology improves artists will be able to deliver their wares to their patrons in whatever form for whatever reward they deem suitable. Would it still be a fair society if I then nicked that work and passed it on freely to everyone I know denying the artist his rightful reward, I don't think so. Software manufactures, music companies and film behemoths have got it wrong and are all suffering as a result. I just hope writers can find a new way of doing business that protects their property. It's selfishness that's wrecking society and digital piracy is just another form of looking after number one. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Des, Andrew Sullivan re-linked to this old post of his (02/01/09) today, but it's relevant to your musings here: My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the authors in the dark, to maintain an Oz-like mystery where none is required. The future is obviously print-on-demand, and writers in the future will make their names first on the web. With e-distribution and e-books, writers will soon be able to put this incompetent and often philistine racket behind us. It couldn't happen too soon. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 121.90.5.239 |
I have to agree with some of that, Craig. 'I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the authors in the dark, to maintain an Oz-like mystery where none is required..' | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.156.185.116 |
>>>"We all use the same words, except in a different order." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHQ2756cyD8 | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
Absolutely brilliant. Never seen it before. Thanks. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
BBC News re 'Kindle Fire': "Amazon is set to unveil a tablet computer on Wednesday, to rival the Apple iPad. The new device is expected to be called the Kindle Fire and will retail for about $300 (£190) in the US. The cheapest version of the current iPad is about $499." | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
As I said before, as a recreational military reconstruction activity this thread inspires thoughts of concupiscence. (Translation for Kindle readers: fuck this for a game of soldiers.) | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
No prizes for guessing which one of the Seven Deadly Sins is your favourite, Joel!  | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
>>>"Text is words. We all use the same words, except in a different order. " I use the same brand of hammer and nails as the local joiners. But that doesn't mean I'm allowed to nick something they've just made just because I like it. If they've made it and I want it, I should buy it, not steal it. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
You've just used (stolen?) my >>>"Text is words. We all use the same words, except in a different order. " out of context. The nuts and bolts, hammer and nails, all belong to the person using them. What is made from those tools is put on the market to be bought, used, stolen, destroyed, left to rot remaindered... It is a physical 'thing' that takes its own life into its onw hands. Ebooks, hypertext are ghosts and shimmers that anyone can use once they've been put there *to* use, copy, paste, pirate, prestidigitate. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
The concept is the same. The writer uses the same tools as the reader - ie words. The writer creates his product using his tools - identical tools to those which are available to everyone else, the same as my hammer and nails are identical to the joiner's hammer and nails. While the writer is creating his product, the words he uses are his, in exactly the same way as the joiner owns the tools of his trade. What is made by the writer is put on the market to be sold, to make money for the writer in exactly the same way as the joiner puts his goods up for sale. For someone to say, well it's perfectly ok fo me to take that because I use the same tools myself is wrong in both cases. Piracy of ebooks is theft, pure and simple. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
Exactly. All I am saying is that a physical object can be stolen - but it can only happen once each time it's stolen. A hypertext/ebook can be stolen millions and millions of times in one fell swoop and then again. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/phenom.html A link from Gary F on another thread. ---------------------- My reply: That's a very interesting link, Gary F. (So's the one with Dolly Parton that followed it from someone else). Gary's link can also be extended to the psychology of what medium the writer knows he is writing *for* (ie. for paper or hypertext) as well as what medium he is actually putting those words *in* in the first place (fountain pen, pencil, biro (and what quality of paper), old-fashioned type-writer, voice on tape-recorder, modern word-processor or direct to internet/hypertext/ebook). | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.8.175 |
Exactly. All I am saying is that a physical object can be stolen - but it can only happen once each time it's stolen. A hypertext/ebook can be stolen millions and millions of times in one fell swoop and then again. But if it is, you still have the original. You're not walking into a garage and stealing a car; rather you're walking into a garage and taking enough measurements to be able to produce an identical car. However, that's not to suggest for a moment that ebook theft is no less a crime, just that it's a different type of crime. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.8.175 |
>>>"Text is words. We all use the same words, except in a different order. " I use the same brand of hammer and nails as the local joiners. But that doesn't mean I'm allowed to nick something they've just made just because I like it. If they've made it and I want it, I should buy it, not steal it. No, but that's not a good metaphor. It's more like "I use the same hammer and nails as the local joiner, but that doesn't mean I should exactly copy something he's designed and made". | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
All crime is crime. There are so many gradations. All we're trying to do here is defeat unfairness to an 'owner' of property, whatever the severity of the crime that caused its loss to that owner. It's just easier, in our field of activity, for hypertext to be stolen than paper print. An idea is easier (mentally and physically) to steal than an object. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
http://www.knibbworld.com/campbell-cgi/discus/show.cgi?tpc=1&post=83636#POST8363 6 | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.8.175 |
All crime is crime. There are so many gradations. All we're trying to do here is defeat unfairness to an 'owner' of property, whatever the severity of the crime that caused its loss to that owner. It's just easier, in our field of activity, for hypertext to be stolen than paper print. An idea is easier (mentally and physically) to steal than an object. Easier, and different - when an idea is stolen it still exists in the original place. When a paper book is stolen, it doesn't. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
Well, yes. That's fascinating. An idea is a fickle creature perhaps that flits from berth to berth, in denial by believing that each berth its its original one? A book is far more containable? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/27/the-future-of-books-a-dystopian-timeline/ The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline This is a brand new article. No need to comment. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.29.5 |
I won't then... Let's stick to digital piracy. Today's lead news story is that a swimmer lost his legs to a shark (the third such attack in a month). Obviously this is fine, since carbon atoms belong to the universe and sharks are just a natural means of redistribution. Don't call it violent death, call it the liberation of blood from the prison of the body. I never thought I'd see purportedly socialist rhetoric used to justify deregulation: the destruction of workers' ability to protect their own income and status. Writers are workers – most of them barely bringing in the minimum wage for what they do – and dissolving their livelihood through digital piracy is no more a liberation of that work than outsourcing production (or services) to the lowest bidder, or shifting it to sources of non-unionised labour. It reminds me of current government rhetoric about their 'liberation' of the NHS into the hands of pirates and privateers. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.51.105 |
I never thought I'd see purportedly socialist rhetoric used to justify deregulation Nice one, Joel. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.181.8.175 |
Ah, but he's playing with our words just because he works with them! | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
According to Will Hutton (a reasonably solid middle-ground economist), the future of the UK economy lies in the knowedge-based industries, including science. That means that intellectual property is potentially the most important property of the near future in business terms. There is now a Minister for Intellectual Property in the government. People can break down the concept online but legislation to protect IP will soon be handing out long jail sentences to online pirates. I'm not in favour of a heavy-handed approach to law enforcement but in this case I'm happy to make an exception. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Mick, I'm not playing with words: I'm arguing that those who work with them need to fight to defend their work from parasites who've run out of other things to deregulate. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.178.152.145 |
Mick, I'm not playing with words: I'm arguing that those who work with them need to fight to defend their work from parasites who've run out of other things to deregulate. I know, Joel - my comment needed a smiley at the end! The 'work' was more a reference to your day job rather than your (undeniably vast) skills at writing.  | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Hey, Des! Another fascinating article on all this that appeared today.... http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/27/sam-harris-on-the-future-of-the -book.html It talks about the state of the publishing industry right now vis-a-vis the tech revolution and online reading habits, etc. Then he argues for a new format, the e-"single." An excerpt: Journalism was the first casualty of this transformation. How can newspapers and magazines continue to make a profit? Online ads don’t generate enough revenue and paywalls are intolerable; thus, the business of journalism is in shambles. Even though I sympathize with the plight of publishers—and share it by association as a writer—as a reader, I am without pity. If your content is behind a paywall, I will get my news elsewhere. I subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker, but when I want to read one of its articles online, I find it galling to have to login and wrestle with its proprietary e-reader. The result is that I read and reference New Yorker articles far less frequently than I otherwise would. I’ve been a subscriber for 25 years, but The New Yorker is about to lose me. What can they do? I don’t know. The truth is, I now expect their content to be free.... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.143.98.239 |
"Unlike print books, digital books are subject to VAT." Saw that on Amazon just now. I didn't know that. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.7.203 |
Mick – I know you were referring to my day job. My fiction writing is further from being my job these days than it has been since I was a teenager. Whatever, it's all good. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.131.175.228 |
http://shopping.yahoo.com/articles/yshoppingarticles/717/7-gadgets-that-wont-be- around-in-2020: Including this section: E-Readers The e-reader has already undergone significant changes in its short history, evolving from a product with a keyboard to one with a touchscreen and more recently being integrated into a kind of a tablet-hybrid, but according to Golvin, the market for e-readers will mostly disappear by the end of the decade. “The tablet will largely supplant the e-reader in the same way that the iPod increasingly gets displaced by smartphones,” Golvin says. “Tablets will take on the e-reader function of handling magazine, newspaper and book reading.” In essence, spending money on an e-reader that can only handle reading when tablets can do this and more will come to seem as useless as buying a GPS system that can only look up directions when other technology does this as well. Just how small the e-reader market becomes may depend somewhat on advancements in display technology. One of the biggest incentives for consumers to buy a pure e-reader is to have an e-ink display (like reading from a book) rather than a backlit display (like reading from a computer screen), but according to Golvin, manufacturers are already working on ways to merge the two reading experiences and create a tablet that doubles as an authentic e-reader. Even then, there may be still be some e-readers on the market at the beginning of next decade, but not many. “It could be that by 2020 you can still buy a super cheap e-reader for $20, but by and large, the volume of sales will be so close to zero as to be indistinguishable, like CD players are now,” he says | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.1.6 |
I bet turntables will still be around then! | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.70.71 |
"I never thought I'd see purportedly socialist rhetoric used to justify deregulation" Well, I never thought I'd see purportedly socialist rhetoric used to justify the hyper-capitalist business models of large corporations, so I guess we've both seen things we weren't expecting. | ||
| Pete_a (Pete_a) Username: Pete_a Registered: 07-2011 Posted From: 75.85.10.161 |
"I bet turntables will still be around then!" Hope so. I just brought all my T.Rex albums back from me mum's shed. (The Roxy and Bowie had long been nicked by my sister) | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.1.6 |
I knew you'd be a man of taste, Pete! | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.27.141 |
Natt, sorry mate, but I don't see how defending the concept of copyright from a writer's viewpoint is justifying "the hyper-capitalist business models of large corporations". Copyright is all that writers (and other creative artists) have to defend their livelihood. Once that's gone, it's all over. Do you really think that writers losing the means to protect their livelihood will somehow bring capitalism crashing down? Your perspective reminds me of some people on the far left who defend the EU Posted Workers Directive (which encourages companies to replace unionised labour with non-unionised and cheaper labour by flying in a corps of migrant workers and housing them in cheap purpose-built dormitory blocks) as being a positive step towards international workers' rights, and labelling trade unionists who oppose it as racist. | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.38.99 |
Apologies, Joel, I should, perhaps, have popped a winking semicolon at the end of that last sentence. I just deeply enjoy games of 'leftier-than-thou.' To be clear, I wasn't arguing against the concept of copyright, but against the description of breaching copyright as being 'stealing'. To describe it as such is only to parrot corporate propaganda produced by industry bodies to drive a deliberate wedge between the people who write things, and the people who want to read the things they have written. I've spent a long time arguing with my union heads at the Writers' Guild about this (there are many long exchanges at my website between me and Bernie Corbett), and I don't think there will be any progress made until writers stop acting as corporate shills for Disney and EMI. I don't think it's 'far left' to accept that there are some things that are in the common good: use of public lands, public transport, education, health, and a shared cultural heritage. The assault on what used to be the public domain over the last century is nothing short of a new Enclosures Act. Large companies are commoditising and parcelling out that which used to belong to us all, and they are using creative artists as human shields. Consider the following: there have been two huge crop shortages in India in the last two years because of GM grain sold by Monsanto which cannot be replaced or reverse-engineered because of intellectual property laws. There have been mass suicides of farmers who planted the seed, including 1500 people in Chattisgarh. The locals who live near where the Neem tree grows in India (and has always grown) can't take advantage of its health-giving properties because W.R.Grace (an American company) took out a patent on the tree. No new works have entered the public domain in Britain for 20 years. Nothing more can be remixed, played with, distributed, or even bought in cheap Wordsworth copies because of the extension of copyright. If Conan Doyle had lived 11 years longer, you still couldn't write your own stories about Sherlock Holmes (essentially exactly the sort of 'theft' you were talking about earlier). The extension of medical patents into countries which never before had them deprives hundreds of thousands of people of access to life-giving medicine. There is a certain district in East Texas which is home to almost nothing but 'patent trolling' companies, which try to file as many and a general patents as possible on business processes, and hire themselves out to companies to issue nuisance lawsuits against their competitors. I personally sat in on a meeting of LOCOG (who are organising the London Olympics) at which they crowed about the fact that no one will be able to use the word 'Olympic' unless they are a paid sponsor. People attending will be stripped of drinks (including water), branded clothing, and, oh yes (http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/the-olympic-law-guilty-until-proven- innocent-2362691.html) the presumption of innocence, all to "protect the intellectual property of the advertisers." (I could go on with this list. Really, really easily.) There is a real war with regard to intellectual property, and people are dying because of it, but the real assailants aren't people (legally) downloading ebooks. You suggested that even to accept the existence of ebooks, and to explore that there may be some advantages for them to writers was inherently supporting theft, and the wanton destruction of a way of life. I think that that's drinking the corporate Koolaid, swallowing the big misdirection, but maybe we just disagree. I shan't question your left-wing bona fides over it. (Any more.) (Oh, and if you *really* want a hard left argument I could put that, but only if it's understood first that I do it with tongue firmly in cheek. "Copyright is there to protect writers' bourgeois self-image, and to stop them having to become members of the working class. A plumber doesn't get paid each time you use the tap he fixes. A builder doesn't get paid every night you sleep in a house they make. The only people who expect to keep getting paid for work they did years ago are the middle classes, who can't find any dignity in work for hire. Writers like copyright because they don't like writing. It transfers some of the rewards of writing to later, in order to bind the writer to the capitalist system which exploits their talents.") | ||
| Pete_a (Pete_a) Username: Pete_a Registered: 07-2011 Posted From: 75.85.10.161 |
While acknowledging that your cheek is full of tongue, Natt, I feel obliged to point out that your analogies are unfair. I agree that a plumber certainly shouldn't expect to be paid "each time" by the same customer. Nor should a builder. But surely if a SECOND customer uses their services, said second customer should pay. As should the third. Or the millionth. So when I buy a Joel Lane book, I should only pay for it once no matter how often I read it. But as soon as YOU buy it, Joel needs to be paid again. | ||
| Pete_a (Pete_a) Username: Pete_a Registered: 07-2011 Posted From: 75.85.10.161 |
But I completely agree with your point about the corporate appropriation of 'intellectual property'. If the fuckers could find a way to trademark oxygen, they'd happily watch us choke. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.114.108 |
There's a Ben Elton play about that very issue called 'Gasping', Pete. Crude, yet amusing and far too close to truth to be wholly satirical. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.131.175.228 |
If a Local Council paid a plumber to instal a public drinking-fountain, would the plumber have royalties each time a kid briefly gushed it while kicking around a stone football? I foresee an ebook becoming a public drinking-fountain. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.1.6 |
If a builder builds a house then sells it, should he get paid each time future owners sell the house on? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 31.53.146.245 |
No, but writers don't get paid when their books are sold on second hand either. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.1.6 |
Of course, but I was commenting more on the analogy than the actuality. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
For a writer, seeing your work pass out of copyright while you are still alive would be like sitting at your desk, paralysed, while your home is taken away piece by piece. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.114.108 |
If a builder writes a book, does he have a right to be paid for it? What if a writer builds a house? If a plumber writes a book in a house, does he have the right to get paid at all, ever, for anything? | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.1.6 |
Your like reely doin me ed in there guv. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.114.108 |
Got the parts on the van, mait? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.131.175.228 |
Are all the taps of the same make that one plumber installs just different versions of the same tap or completely different taps once you've paid him for labour and parts? I don't think it makes any difference either way. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.158.58.183 |
If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else. Cornelia Funke | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Forgive me if this has already been posted here but it seems Wiley is going after some of the ebook pirates: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/49342-wile y-goes-after-bit-torrent-pirates.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly%27s+PW+Daily& utm_campaign=a5b452b3ed-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.131.175.228 |
I see Tartarus are bringing out an ebook version of Mrs Midnight. Is that a good or bad thing? | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.56.49 |
They may have a problem; certainly in the UK, even though prosecutors had that information, the law was a bit unhelpful when it came to proving the owner of the connection was the one performing the act of downloading the copyrighted files. I notice they claim one book was downloaded 74,000 times, with the obvious inference that the owners had lost 74,000 sales, but I'd say the likelihood is few if any of the downloaders would have actually bought the book had they not been able to obtain it illegally. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.56.49 |
I was replying to Caroline, in case anyone's confused! | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.56.49 |
...and to reply to Des, I think it's a good thing. I won't be buying it as I already have the lovely hardback but it's another market. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.158.58.183 |
"I notice they claim one book was downloaded 74,000 times, with the obvious inference that the owners had lost 74,000 sales, but I'd say the likelihood is few if any of the downloaders would have actually bought the book had they not been able to obtain it illegally." And shoplifters probably wouldn't buy the jewellery and anything else they nick if they didn't obtain it illegally. It's still stealing. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.56.49 |
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!! It is, Marc - as I've said elsewhere on this board, it's wrong. However, if that book WAS stolen 74,000 times, the original owners would still have it. If you stole jewellery, the owners would have lost it. Both are wrong, but both are emphatically NOT the same. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.28.255 |
May I clarify the argument as I see it? I think the point that second-hand books earn no money for the author is irrelevant. The issue, surely, is that authors own the copyright on their work and choose where to sell or license it, and what rights are sold. By selling the rights to publish a book I take into account that some copies may be sold second-hand and earn me no further royalties. That is not the same as piracy or copyright theft at all. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.13.138 |
I spent some time at work today discussing patent law with two lawyers who specialise in intellectual copyright protection for small science-based companies and academics. If the idea of intellectual property is corroded, the knowledge-based industries as well as the creative industries are destroyed, and we're frankly left with fuck all. Theft of intellectual property has to be punished with imprisonment and the confiscation and destruction of theft machines. Not to protect corporate interests. To protect people working in creative and knowledge-based industries whose livelihood will otherwise be drained away by fucking parasites. The ticks and liver flukes of the internet. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.13.138 |
Sorry, intellectual property protection. It's been a long day. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.56.49 |
Theft of intellectual property has to be punished with imprisonment and the confiscation and destruction of theft machines. Hmm - bit draconian, surely? Yes, if there's a bloke permanently and illegally copying and selling films (or ebooks, to keep on-topic), but if the 10 year old lad next door copies a couple of CDs for his mates, you want to give him a criminal record? I'd be inside if we went down that path; I've created "mix" (or even "Mick's"!) CDs for friends in the past. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Sorry, I should have clarified that I meant theft for commercial purposes. I don't think private copying is either serious or preventable. Poppy Z. Brite photocopied a borrowed copy of Thomas Ligotti's first book because she couldn't find a copy on sale. That's the kind of thing fans do. Mick, if you were making copies of CDs and selling them by the hundred online, I think you'd agree that would be a crime. Making a mix tape for a friend may be a minor technical illegality, but it's not a crime. I saw a wonderful new play a few years ago in which a young man had died suddenly, and it was revealed that he had a terminal (non-communicable) illness and hadn't told his girlfriend. He'd left a mix tape for her with no track listing. She spent ages trying to find out what the tracks were and what the eclectic selection could mean. Finally she realised that all the song titles run together in order were a message from him, telling her how much he loved her. Had me in tears. But then, so does the speaking clock. | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.65.230 |
Ooooh, I promised myself I wouldn't get sucked into this thread again, but... Why does it not surprise me that patent lawyers think that patent law is vital, and that more people should prosecute patent-infringement in courts? (Again, not that I'm suggesting that there is no use for patents, but can we at least be slightly analytical about the sources we're using for evidence.) And I think it's a bit rich to suddenly claim that this whole argument has been about commercial infringement, when it clearly hasn't. There is no such thing as commercial infringement of ebooks. Unlike CDs and DVDs and generic medicines, there is no one printing off ersatz books, and trying to sell them on street corners. Or there may be, but that hasn't been what we've been talking about at all. No one makes money off pirating an ebook. It's not a commercial operation. Unlike with Rolexes, Viagra, Zoolander DVDs and iPads, there are no factories in the Far East churning out knock-off books. With regard to e-books, all anyone has been talking about is non-commercial pirating. Which is kind of why (and we're back to mix-tapes again) the constant refrain in my head during this argument has been "Home Taping Is Killing Music", which preceded the decade in which the music industry made more money than in any previous decade in history. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.23.174 |
"Non-commercial pirating" means that someone presumes they're entitled to steal my copyrighted work and share it with others online. As far as I'm concerned that's just as bad as their selling it. I should like to meet them and deal with them, and I'd be happy for someone else to do so. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.161.160 |
What a petty mess commodification makes of art. | ||
| Tems (Tems) Username: Tems Registered: 02-2010 Posted From: 68.164.109.136 |
Now and then I've allowed people to reprint or translate my work for free when it was clearly for non-commercial or at least marginally commercial purposes. But I want to be asked first. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation, but perhaps I'm just old-fashioned. I've posted an article concerning my own attitude toward ebooks. My opinions on the subject are often contradictory, so I thought I may as well own up to them: http://www.m-s-tem.com/tems/blog1.php/sotto-voce -- Steve Rasnic Tem | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.28.79 |
It isn't unreasonable at all, Steve. It's your choice to make as the author and nobody else's - precisely the point I've been making. Interesting blog too! | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
It seems even Amazon are upsetting people by seemingly taking authors' work without permission: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/ 49430-could-amazon--s-lending-library-end-in-court-.html?utm_source=Publishers+W eekly%27s+PW+Daily&utm_campaign=5c6796c607-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.11.200 |
And I would have no problem with you dealing with them however you saw fit, Ramsay. And if Thomas Ligotti wishes to demand physical retribution from Poppy Z. Brite at some point, I shall support his right to do so to. However, I think adopting the rhetoric of 'stealing' is inaccurate for the many, many reasons people have outlined above. What those people are doing is criminal, but it is not theft. It is one of the many other crimes people can commit. In my view it's a particularly pernicious piece of unspeak explicitly designed by large corporate entities to put creators at odds with those who consume their creations. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Taking something without permission is stealing. Regardless of whether or not it magically replenishes itself. You may not be taking a physical object but you are certainly depriving the author and publishers of their share of the funds you should have given. Therefore because you take the ebook, someone is short of money that they should by right have - you are guilty of theft. Trying to argue otherwise is just trying to justify a crime against the the author and publishers. | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.11.200 |
No, it's not, it's to demand exactitude in language, and non-flabbiness of thought. Depriving someone of putative future funds is not the same as stealing from them. That's why when someone does it you sue them for 'loss of earnings'. Not 'theft'. The fact that you think that trying to be exact in the terms we use is 'justifying a crime' is characteristic of the problem. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Taking something that you're supposed to pay for, without paying for it, is theft. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Legal Dictionary Main Entry: theftFunction: nounEtymology: Old English thiefth:LARCENY; broadly:a criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent NOTE: Theft commonly encompasses by statute a variety of forms of stealing formerly treated as distinct crimes.grand theft:theft of property or services whose value exceeds a specified amount or of a specified kind of property (as an automobile) NOTE: Grand theft is a felony.petty theft:theft of property or services whose value is below a specified amount called also petit theftNOTE: Petty theft is a misdemeanor but may be aggravated by prior convictions. Note that theft includes theft of services, which surely covers taking something that remains available for use... | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
An author provides the service of writing a book, the publisher provides the service of publishing it in e-form. To take that service without paying for it is the dictionary definition of theft. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Is that enough exactitude of language? | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.11.200 |
But of course, they are not taking a service. That would be entering into a contract with an author, watching them work, and then not paying them at the end of it. You are implying that services that have been paid for in the past can be stolen in the future. The act of copyright infringement is not theft, legally, so to quote a legal dictionary is really shooting yourself in the foot. It is a different crime. You can say it as much as you want over and over again. The law, logic, morality, and most of the world's humans agree with me. Stealing is stealing, copyright infringement is copyright infringement. So, no, not really, it's not really enough exactitude of language. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.155.19.170 |
However you define it, it's made more likely by the arrival of some publishers' and writers' encouragement of ebooks. | ||
| Nathaniel Tapley (Natt) Username: Natt Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 92.21.11.200 |
Oh yes, Des, I don't dispute that, and the perils and opportunities of digital formats are well worth arguing about. But if I were to start describing squatting as 'house murder' because it deprives my of my property in the same way that I would be deprived of my grandmother if she were murdered, that might not be the best way to conduct a textured, reasoned debate on squatting / house murder. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.155.19.170 |
I'm not a legal expert but I found it very interesting about the recent reported trial about 'involuntary manslaughter'. This is a good place to discuss such fine points. But writers live here and any sniff of unfairness will detract from such fineness of debate... and barrack-room definitions will inevitably emerge, with many of which I sympathise as a writer myself. Meawhile - we all know who the real culprits are. The internet and ebooks. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.184.107.225 |
An e-book is an asset of the company. An intangible asset, but still an asset. To take the asset legally, one partakes of a contract with the company in question, normally by means of handing over the money. Since theft covers the taking of intangible assets as well as tangible assets, the taking of an intangible asset is theft. "But of course, they are not taking a service. That would be entering into a contract with an author, watching them work, and then not paying them at the end of it. " They are taking a service. The author has sat down and written the book. The author has put many many hours into the work for their enjoyment. He has provided a service to all who read the book. It's theft. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.250.213 |
Meawhile - we all know who the real culprits are. The internet and ebooks. Not trying to be disingenous, but the internet is simply a vast network of machines, and not culpable of anything. It's people who are the culprits, and it always was; they just find different tools, and the internet and the advent of ebooks makes things easier for them. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.155.19.170 |
I agree with that, Mick. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.31.75 |
"And I would have no problem with you dealing with them however you saw fit, Ramsay. And if Thomas Ligotti wishes to demand physical retribution from Poppy Z. Brite at some point, I shall support his right to do so to." Poppy then bought her own copy of the book, and it was the basis of her writing the introduction to his work. Would you mind spelling my name right, by the way? | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.31.75 |
A few more thoughts. Poppy copied a book that was out of print and then unobtainable, and frankly nobody could have known at the time that it would be reprinted. That's surely not the same as choosing to copy a book that is commercially available when your buying that book (electronically or otherwise) would earn the author a royalty. Anyone who does so is choosing to do the author out of that royalty. I call that theft. Let me own up. By the time I owned a DVD player Mario Bava's Rabid Dogs was long out of print and couldn't be had. I bought a pirate copy. As soon as the film became officially available again (most of a decade later) I bought that version. The copyright holder therefore lost no income from my original action, and I wouldn't have wanted them to. I don't feel my publishers are trying to put me at odds with my readers. I think it's a silly idea. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.31.75 |
"However, I think adopting the rhetoric of 'stealing' is inaccurate for the many, many reasons people have outlined above. What those people are doing is criminal, but it is not theft. It is one of the many other crimes people can commit. In my view it's a particularly pernicious piece of unspeak explicitly designed by large corporate entities to put creators at odds with those who consume their creations." To be clear, if large corporate entities told authors that criminals were responsible for their loss of earnings, that wouldn't be putting the two groups at odds? I can't see it myself. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.6.24 |
I see what you're saying, but would PZB have re-bought the book if she hadn't liked it? Unless there's an "or your money back" guarantee, a significant part of a writer's work must come from people who end up not enjoying the work. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Let me own up. By the time I owned a DVD player Mario Bava's Rabid Dogs was long out of print and couldn't be had. I bought a pirate copy. As soon as the film became officially available again (most of a decade later) I bought that version. The copyright holder therefore lost no income from my original action, and I wouldn't have wanted them to. To be perfectly fair, though, until that official version came out, Ramsey, you were - for 10 years - a law-breaking purchaser of pirated material. Couldn't someone use the same argument with: As soon as I get a job and can afford it, I swear, I'll buy this film legally? ... But then, I think all these infringement, etc., laws are vaguely similar to the famous statement about pornography, that you know it when you see it. Most people don't exhaust all avenues to see if they can obtain, legally, a film or book experience. They simply click-and-steal. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.27.235 |
"To be perfectly fair, though, until that official version came out, Ramsey, you were - for 10 years - a law-breaking purchaser of pirated material. Couldn't someone use the same argument with: As soon as I get a job and can afford it, I swear, I'll buy this film legally?" Not really, as in one case there is no way to get the money to the artist or his estate. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Not really, as in one case there is no way to get the money to the artist or his estate. Again, just to be perfectly fair - does that mean, Proto, it's less wrong, technically? Money still changed hands. In fact, one could argue this is a more egregious example than merely, say, downloading something illegally: money was both denied the original artist, and as well, put into the hands of a "pirate." This is why all these laws are, and should be, not so set in stone. | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.176.135.141 |
Ramsey's examples about Poppy Z. Brite and about his own Mario Bava DVD are very similar to my example much earlier in the thread: I downloaded uncollected JD Salinger stories, because there was no other practical means to get to them. I don't feel guilty. If they ever appear in print, would I buy them? Well, probably not as (a) I am not as big a Salinger fan anymore as 20 years ago, and (b) these uncollected stories are not as good as his better known stories - strangely enough his last magazine published (and never collected) story was undigestible. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.54.4 |
"Again, just to be perfectly fair - does that mean, Proto, it's less wrong, technically? Money still changed hands." I'd say it's a little less wrong. I also don't think stealing is an appropriate word. If someone owned an infinite fountain of lovely chocolate milk and someone else filled a cup from it without paying what the person was asking, it would be wrong, but stealing seems too strong a word. The economic principle of the paradox of value applies here. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Your example brings to mind the laws in England that I'm fuzzy on at best, I'm sure you're better acquainted with, about landed estates that would prosecute the poor from poaching quail and such from their vast properties. There always seemed something terribly wrong about that, to my mind, if I understood them correctly.... I think we're actually in agreement on all this, Proto. It's a blurry realm, but you kinda know the bad things when you see them, and the not-so-bad-at-all-really things when you see those, either. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.152.206.30 |
Taking it further, if someone devoted their careers and made their living by sinking chocolate milk wells, this might in the long run adversely affect expertise in the area and damage future supplies of new flavours of milk. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.144.33.70 |
It's fairly simple. If you are supposed to pay to obtain something, and you go out and grab it wiothout paying for it, you've stolen it. It's in your possession. you should have paid. you didn't... The owner of the item you've taken has lost th evalue of the item you've taken, whether taht's a tangible or intangible item. That is theft. pure and simple. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I don't mean to sound glib, Weber, but it's not always so simple. I think strict rules is the problem, whereas it should be judged with some kind of common sense - because we all know theft when we see it, and we all know when it's not theft, though gnat-snatching definitions of the law might take it the wrong way. Say I'm over a very dear friend's house. I'm looking over his bookcase, and I see a Clive Barker book I've been wanting to read. I take it out, and then he says he has to run suddenly, lock up after myself. I take the book home, and read it. Now, I didn't get specific permission from this friend, to borrow this specific book; nor did I compensate the author in any way for the reading experience. As long at that situation remained that way, I'm a thief - I stole something not mine, didn't compensate the author, and received benefit from it. Let's say later, I tell the dear friend, Oh, forgot to mention, I borrowed that Clive Barker book from your shelf. No problem, he says, I didn't even notice it was gone, keep it as long as you like. Suddenly, I've been transformed from thief, to perfectly law-abiding individual. These copyright, etc., laws are extremely fluid and defy strict interpretations. But anyone with some basic sense of decency and ethics, knows when the line's crossed, and when it's not. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.145.129.215 |
Well in that example, the author has already received his cut and therefore his/her royalties are irrelevant to that tale. The person you've robbed is your friend. When he says it's fine (probably with a "YOU thieving twat" under his breath) then indeed you are no longer a thief and merely in possession of someone elses property with their permission. Theft is theft. If you take something that you are supposed to pay for without paying for it, you've stolen it. In your example, you wouldn't expect to pay your friend for the new Clive barker (inless you dropped it in the bath and wrecked it) and would simply hand it back when you've finished. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
You have a point there, Weber. But you know what I mean, don't you? We all - assuming we're not thieving twats to begin with - we all know theft; we don't need laws to tell us what theft is. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.145.129.215 |
Well some people apparently think that taking an e-book without paying for it doesn't count as theft, so maybe we don't all know what it is. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.252 |
Taking an ebook without paying for it is obviously theft as common English usage. The point is, I feel, that the culture being built up by ebooks etc are making such thieving (through plagiarism or piracy) more likely, even acceptable in some eyes. (And that is ignoring any Aesthetic and commercial entropy issues concerned with ebooks versus real books.) | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.28.10 |
"Say I'm over a very dear friend's house. I'm looking over his bookcase, and I see a Clive Barker book I've been wanting to read. I take it out, and then he says he has to run suddenly, lock up after myself. I take the book home, and read it. Now, I didn't get specific permission from this friend, to borrow this specific book; nor did I compensate the author in any way for the reading experience. As long at that situation remained that way, I'm a thief - I stole something not mine, didn't compensate the author, and received benefit from it. Let's say later, I tell the dear friend, Oh, forgot to mention, I borrowed that Clive Barker book from your shelf. No problem, he says, I didn't even notice it was gone, keep it as long as you like. Suddenly, I've been transformed from thief, to perfectly law-abiding individual." Which is nothing like copying an e-book without paying. I really think the comparisons being made on this thread are ever more convoluted and irrelevant. I'm not sure the existence of e-books is to blame for people's attitudes, Des. I think the current fashion for blaming corporations for one's own personal moral choices is far more culpable. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.252 |
I agree with Ramsey's thrust. Just on ebooks - they seem to me to represent an unstoppable self-perpetuating culture that is making certain (inexcusable) choices more likely (again, ignoring any separate Aesthetic or commercial entropy issues concerned with ebooks). | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.2 |
Japan rejecting ebooks? http://www.thebookseller.com/news/japan-rejecting-e-books-claims-report.html | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.145.131.7 |
It's curious that this thread should pop up again now. Yesterday i tried reading something on a friend's kindle for the first time. Got to say I'm really not impressed. It still looks like a cheap and nasty piece of plastic. The "keyboard" is distracting. Something about the screen just doesn't feel right to be reading off, the contrast is all wrong or something. Then we get to the technical shit things. I was eating while I was reading so the kindle was flat on the table next to me. Half way down a page, the screensave came on because it hadn't been touched so I had to fiddle about with the buttons before I could continue with the sentence I was reading. That's fucking annoying and I don't recall it ever happening with a real book. Once I'd finished eating I picked the crappy thing up. Four times I managed to knock one of the buttons and turn the page before I was ready. Again, this isn't a problem with a real book. My opinion on them is now lower than it was before. | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
That's not been my experience with the Kindle at all. The new versions don't have the keyboard at all. The keyboard on the old versions doesn't get in the way as you generally hold it by the side of the device as that's where the page-on buttons are. I didn't even think the KIndle had a screensaver, I've certainly never experienced it even after several hours of using the device. There is a screensave button at the top of the device, but you physically have to slide that to the right to engage it. Can't say I've had that problem with the buttons either. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
I was holding it by the side (holding it by the top kind of obscures the view - that's how come I kept catching the buttons. After trying one out I still think they're shit. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
forgot to close the bracket after the word view | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
Can't say I share your concerns about the Kindle I'm afraid. Never had any of those problems myself and, due to the nature of my job, I use one frequently. Other e-readers are actually available by the way, so if you don't like the design there are others to choose. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.25.0.77 |
I'm waiting for one you can get the telly on. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.254.46 |
Some friends came round on saturday for a meal - one of them had brought her Kindle over and it was the first time I'd had a look at one away from a shop. I thought it was fine - personally I still prefer the feel of a book, but I'd be happy using a Kindle. It works well for her too as she (unusually) doesn't like bookshelves and book cases - after she's read a book she doesn't want to keep it, so it's pretty much the perfect solution for her. | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
Yup. As I'm sure I said earlier, I actually do prefer physically books in my pleasure reading, as it were. However, rather than taking masses of manuscripts home when I lock myself away and read through the subs pile, I can fit them all on a Kindle. As for the reading experience, I find the screen fine. It does actually look pretty much like ink on paper to me. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.19.90 |
Jenny has one and is fond of it. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I'm waiting for one you can get the telly on. Hahahahahahahahahahaha! | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
He's classy that Gary Fry, for sure. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Our daughter just got one for her birthday. One handy thing is that because it's on my account, by going to the book she's reading and letting it sync I can see till how late the scamp has been reading... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.2 |
My wife has one, too | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
>>One handy thing is that because it's on my account, by going to the book she's reading and letting it sync I can see till how late the scamp has been reading...<< If she's anything like I was when I was little (with real books in those days, of course), it'll be a case of reading under the bedclothes with a torch till long after lights-out time! | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I return to my original comment: Before the e-books, it was very hard to pirate, etc., written material. Now that books are fast going digitized, such concerns will loom ever larger and larger. And then, once the EMP bomb hits, and we're all back in the dark age... good luck reading on those things! | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
Okay Craig, that's not really taking it back to a debate though is it? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.2 |
There is only one way to go - eventually - the non ebook way. That, I believe, everyone will know when they see the enormity of what they are tempting into existence. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...sorry, nodded off there. We still on this? | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
She does exactly that, Caroline! She says it's brilliant now that she can use one hand to hold the torch and the other to hold the Kindle. When she was reading paper books she would prop the torch between her head and shoulder. Her schoolfriends went nuts when they saw her Kindle at her birthday party, and we had to put it out of their reach. One of them, looking around the house, said to my daughter in all seriousness, "Do you live in a library?" It seemed really funny at the time, but they know her mum is a librarian, the house is full of thousands of books; it was a fairly sensible conclusion! | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.25.0.77 |
Yes, it's getting 'kin dull, isn't it? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.2 |
Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy... | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
The problem is that it isn't so much a debate anymore. People have totally made up their minds either way. Yes, it's getting repetitive and a bit dull. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Hey, I thought my stories about the kids were really sweet and charming! Having read with interest Des's blogging about The Weird, I pre-ordered the kindle version and it's just been released, appearing on there this morning. 37,668 locations! I've read books that were shorter than the contents page! They say kindles get infinitesimally heavier as they fill up, but psychologically mine feels chunkier today... | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
I didn't even realise that was available for the Kindle. Just brought it. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.254.46 |
That's a good point - I already have the book but it's very unwieldy - I don't have a Kindle but I could put it on my iPad which, although heavier than a Kindle, is still lots lighter than the actual book! | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.2 |
Does it have double-columns on each page as the physical book of 'The WEIRD' has? I find these columns are intrinsic to some of the stories. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.156.210.82 |
I find those columns annoying as hell... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.237.2 |
Part of reading is to be annoyed by the squashed fly of a summer still yearned-for or the escaped baboon from between the bars of text. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
With a book this long, even the free kindle preview is very substantial. It's 1948 locs long, and includes the Foreweird, Introduction and all of the first two stories. Well worth a download for anyone not sure whether to buy the full book yet. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I've really not made up my mind, Jonathan - I express both sides, I'm of two minds. I would like to have one of these e-readers to read, say, spec scripts I've gotten a hold of - gawd, it would be perfect for such a thing! But so far, I've only tried the Nook - and it screws up the formatting of pdfs you put on yourself, though it touts its ability to read stuff you put on, not just stuff you buy. These things, I wonder, do they really want to make it easy to read your own pdfs?... I don't think so... another mark against them, unless I can find one (someone can recommend one?) that does allow it - or, just buy an iPad.... | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Craig, it's not that they don't want you to use pdfs, it's just that many pdfs don't contain the information needed: they're kind of like pieces of paper with the letters stuck on. One sticker doesn't know where the other stickers are or how they relate to each other, and any converters just take their best guess. Kindles do however let you email the pdf to them without converting, keeping all the original formatting completely intact, and just cropping the margins when you look at them in landscape mode. I often do this with review pdfs. But really, you wouldn't want to use a kindle for reading scripts, they're the wrong size and too slow for something you'd whizz through. Like you say, an iPad is perfect for that - I heard somewhere that they're already being used on some TV shows to let them distribute updated scripts more easily. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
Oh, I didn't know THE WEIRD was available as an e-book. Shall download the sample to remind me to buy it once the xmas rush has passed. Incidentally, I see Ray Bradbury has allowed FAHRENHEIT 451 to be released as an e-book. Now all I need is for the two volumes of his collected shorts to be released. They're currently taking up a LOT of space on my bedside table/bookshelves respectively. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
>>Part of reading is to be annoyed by the squashed fly of a summer still yearned-for ..<< Especially when you buy the book second hand and you wonder who squashed the fly and what they're still yearning for ... By the way, I think Paul's thread about illegal downloads of films is pertinent to this thread too - if it's happening with film and thereby causing problems for the writer, who's to say it won't cause problems for book writers too? I don't think this issue should be dismissed. OK e-readers are the way things are going, but is it *really* the right way? | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.254.46 |
I just downloaded the sample of The Weird to the Kindle app on my iPad, and I can confirm that it's in two columns if I hold the iPad in landscape, but only one in portrait. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.156.32.78 |
This is my LAST WORD article published by ZENE (TTA Press) in 1996: Snail mail! That’s how us old-fashioned folk are now written off in some quarters because we ain’t got Internet or E-mail or whatever it is called. I’m not a luddite, nor am I someone who cringes at modernity, nor do I make whining excuses as to technology’s affordability. If it’s vital to our culture, get it, whatever the cost, I say. You only live once – I think. No, what I have against worldwide immediacy of communication is the eventual ephemerality or, another pretentious word meaning the same thing, transience, whose drawback is prevalent whatever best will in the world remembers to save on the system. Who will collect your letters for future publication? Who will be able to fondle and sniff the wondrously aesthetic second-hand book containing your creative work? Can you lounge in the bath reading a screen? Well, I suppose so, at a push. There’s something very pleasantly human and fallible about books or magazines. Personality oozes from written correspondence: the type of stamp and envelope used, the perfume, the green ink looniness, etc… When I was at university, nobody seemed to have phones and I always had to write to my parents, saving them the bother of my impulsive problems – cos I’d always sorted them out by the time I got to writing a letter – unlike my own grown-up children who pick up the phone at the slightest whim of distemper. (Nice to hear from you, though, kids.) Goodness knows what I’d be getting on the screen, if I had E-mail. I get enough off-the-cuff insults in writing, as it is! But it seems I’ll no longer be able to submit stories to pukka magazines for much longer. Words’ll be all flying round a hyperspace which has no room for an old fogey like me. Then, there is that other hyperspace called death. You only die once. Well, at a push. Of the abandon-edit button. Published ‘Zene’ Autumn 1996 | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.156.32.78 |
...and following that, all my LAST WORD articles are shown here: http://etepsed.wordpress.com/tta-zene-last-word/ | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.183.126.98 |
...I just bought H R Wakefield's "Old Man's Beard" as an ebook for less than six pounds, from Ashtree Press. Bit of a bargain as nice condition hardback copies usually change hands for £200 and above nowadays. I'd rather have the book on my shelves to match the other five but this'll certainly do for now. Thanks to Barbara and Christopher for not shying away from changing technology. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.27.247 |
You mean you can save money with this stuff? Hmmm. (Sound of mind changing.) | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
One of the reasons behind our decision to put some of our older, out of print titles out electronically is precisely because hard copy editions are trading hands at very high prices; too high for the average person who simply wants to read the stories. In an ideal world we could afford to publish 100 hardbound, high quality copies to meet demand and satisfy the collectors who want the physical book on their shelf, but economic reality dictates otherwise. And what with postage costs from Canada (which has no book/printed paper rate), it's less expensive to buy the e-book version than it would be to pay postage on the book itself (never mind the cost of the book). Some people who love printed books see e-books as a threat; some people who love e-books sneer at anyone still buying/reading physical books. It's not an either/or proposition in my book (sorry); the two can co-exist. Arguing that one is 'better' than the other is ultimately futile, like arguing that MP3 files are better than CDs or vice versa. There are benefits and drawbacks to both; but they can, and do, co-exist. I can understand that some publishers might decide against producing e-books, for whatever reason, and that's fine with me. We simply decided it made economic sense for us, and was a good way to get copies of our books into the hands of people who won't pay £28 (plus postage) for one of our titles, but will £4.50 for the book. I spoke with two publishers - independently of each other - at World Fantasy in San Diego in October, and both said the same thing: e-books are, or will soon account for, 20% of their sales. I asked how much of that 20% was people buying e-books instead of a physical copy of the book, and both said the overlap was negligible; what they were finding was that the people buying e-books wouldn't normally have bought the actual book, either at hardback or trade paperback prices. So they aren't selling e-books at the expense of the physical books; they're selling them in addition to them. Food for thought, perhaps, for publishers trying to decide whether or not to get into the e-book market. | ||
| Matthew_fell (Matthew_fell) Username: Matthew_fell Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
If I can chip into this conversation for a couple of minutes, please: Two years ago, nothing would have convinced me that I would want a Kindle, or any other eReader. Then I had need for quick access to a text I needed, and found that an eVersion of it was available on Kindle, and that I could install Kindle for PC on the netbook/laptop, and solve my problem with a couple of keystrokes. And the reading experience wasn't bad. So I tried a couple more books, and grew to like it. So much so that I couldn't wait for my birthday to roll around, 'cos that's when I was getting the pucker thing . . . a Kindle in the flesh, as it were. Right now, I have somewhere in the region of 800 books available to me . . . many(most) of them free downloads (books that I've always wanted to read, but never got around to, in the main). And I'm finding that I'm reading more than ever . . . because I can pick up the Kindle any time . . . while I'm sat in the car waiting for someone, comfortably in bed without having to find some way of propping up a book the size of a doorstopper . . . you've all been there, you know what I mean. So now I have accessible texts, any number of them, and books that I'm likely to read once (so if I buy an eBook, I don't have to think about how much I'm going to lose by trading a hardback to a second-hand dealer) don't present a storage problem. I can keep the book on file for as long as I want to and I'm finding that reading is more accessible, because all of my books will fit into my pocket, and I don't have to think about carting them around, or run the risk of ripping dust jackets or damaging the book in another way. From a publisher's point of view, the eBook appeals to me hugely. Chiefly, it means that I can put the work of deserving authors in front of an audience that would actually like to read that work, but wouldn't contemplate buying it at the price we need to charge to make a hardback viable. There are any number of contemporary authors out there whose work deserves to be read, but the chances of their being seen by a wide audience fades with the hardback price . . . believe me, I have enough copies of contemporary authors' books in stock to convince me that it is so! From an author's point of view, it also means that they have a better chance of convincing me to publish their novel/collection (assuming it meets our normal standards) because it can now be done as an eBook . . . and, judging by early sales results (and we've been at it for only a month), the sales are going to be there. And there are one or two of you out there who are likely to be hearing from me sometime soon . . . I hold to the view that the hardback/paperback physical book will remain desirable, certainly for some years to come - and I have no intention of quitting buying the physical version in cases where I actually WANT a physical version - but the eBook has the potential to increase the visibility and accessibility of writers, and that IS a good thing. If eReading isn't for you, fine, too. No one is holding a gun to your head; but with eBooks you'll be able to get more bang for your buck . . . and you'll still have a book at the end of the day, though it'll be in electronic form. Oh, and just to demonstrate how serious I am with eBooks, if you have a collection or a novel, or a novella, and you think it might be something that Ash-Tree would consider making available in electronic form, you're invited to talk it over with us. Send us an email at ashtree@ash-tree.bc.ca, and we'll see where we go from there. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.156.32.78 |
With many publishers and budding publishers increasingly publishing or re-publishing books as Ebooks for Kindles etc., one can visualise the time when everything will be available. With everything available, nothing is available. Well, nothing special, any more. Furthermore, there is an accreting ’culture’ being (inadvertently) encouraged by these publishers of Ebooks - a culture that arguably enables and encourages plagiarism, piracy etc. Also, it is my opinion that real paper books have empirically been the only vehicles able to carry fiction works future-nostalgically and memorably as well as effectively in their hard core emotion and tangibility and handleability. Finally, and more importantly, I hope I have shown in several reviews that a physical book is part of the text's meaning and can affect it radically when compared to the same text in an ebook (it is the form previous authors would have envisaged their work appearing, just as an example). My last word, as I know many friends are fed up with my views on this. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Great to see more small press publishers offering ebooks. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.183.126.98 |
It's not an either/or proposition in my book A good point, Barbara, and one which gets lost in all the pro- and con arguments over ebooks. With many publishers and budding publishers increasingly publishing or re-publishing books as Ebooks for Kindles etc., one can visualise the time when everything will be available. With everything available, nothing is available. Well, nothing special, any more. Des, does that mean in my situation that it would be somehow 'better' for me to not have the ebook available and have to pay £272 for the book I just bought instead of £5.80? In that instance it's only 'special' for the guy that's selling it to me, for the profit he's made on it, and I'd be able to afford and read a whole lot fewer books. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.156.32.78 |
Oh, yes, Happy Christmas and New Year, everyone on this thread and elsewhere. I hope all your creative dreams are fulfilled, whatever your method of fufilling them. des | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
Des: Books aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Even though Christopher has a Kindle, there are some physical books under the tree for him this year too, and we (and probably 95% of the people who read) will continue to buy 'actual' books. I love books: I love the feel and look of them, the heft of them, the design and layout, the cover art, the tidy rows of print - hiding who knows what delights - marching boldly across each page, that feeling of turning pages, of actually seeing the end getting closer. At the end of the day, however, it's the content that ultimately interests and engages me; the rest is window dressing (albeit very attractive and inviting window dressing), and in all but a very few cases irrelevant to the central question: is the actual content of the book interesting, engaging, well written, and worth my time? Just because previous authors would have envisaged their work being presented in the form of physical books doesn't mean that's the form we have to cleave exclusively to, with other forms available. It would be like arguing that since LPs were the form musicians were accustomed to having their work presented in for decades, we should eschew CDs - and now audio files - for the sake of artist expectations. I think that if you did a straw poll of artists or writers, the vast majority would say they want their work to get out, and be available, to the largest number of potential customers. I know that, as a writer, I don't particularly mind what form people choose to read my work in; I just want them to read it. "Furthermore, there is an accreting ’culture’ being (inadvertently) encouraged by these publishers of Ebooks - a culture that arguably enables and encourages plagiarism, piracy etc." Apart from blaming the victim ("See, if you hadn't made that book available in electronic format I wouldn't have been able to pirate it, so it's your fault"), it's a specious argument. As long as something, somewhere, is perceived to have some value, someone who wants it will try to get it for less than the going rate, and ideally for free. Anyone here ever made a cassette recording of an LP they had for a friend? Loaned a physical book to a friend so she could read it without having to buy it? Bought a secondhand copy of a book that was still available in print and priced at full (or close to) price? If people want to pirate something, Des, they will; to take e-books specifically, the best a publisher can do is put what safeguards they can in place. To try to argue that making e-books available encourages piracy, so e-books are responsible for some people engaging in what is, after all, a criminal activity, therefore e-books are emphatically Not A Good Thing, is (for me) a non-starter. I'd say a far more serious threat to writers is material of theirs being made available illegally on the Internet; and in the vast majority of electronic copyright infringement cases I've heard about, the offending material did not come from e-books, it came from people scanning actual books to their computer. | ||
| Matthew_fell (Matthew_fell) Username: Matthew_fell Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
I'm late coming to it, but I noticed this post from Des from a month or so ago: -- I see Tartarus are bringing out an ebook version of Mrs Midnight. Is that a good or bad thing?-- Well, consider: None of Reggie's collections so far have been available in editions geared to a wide market: 2 from Haunted River, 1 from Ash-Tree, 1 from Ex-Occidente, 1 from Tartarus, etc., so the books have been acquired only by folk willing to shell out £25 or more for those editions. Not, I'm sure you would agree, Des, a situation likely to get Reggie widely read. (The other edition of his work was put out by Centipede in a huge, unwieldy volume with a price to match.). I think you might agree, too, that Reggie deserves to be read widely, so how can an eBook edition of MRS MIDNIGHT not be a good thing. And just to support the movement to make Reggie more widely available, I expect to finish proofing the eBook edition of MASQUES OF SATAN sometime today, and it should be available in eBook format before the end of the day . . . with Reggie's enthusiastic support (and why wouldn't he?). I simply can't puzzle out the attitude expressed by you earlier (and paraphrased now) that having everything available makes them not worth having. Makes no sense to me. Readers need to be able to get the material they want to read; and many writers can benefit from reading the work of others. And, of course, the writer benefits, because his/her work is actually reaching an audience, rather than languishing and gathering dust in what was a limited edition of 100 or so. | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.176.71.235 |
Christopher, I very much support the efforts of bringing Reggie Oliver's books in affordable e-format so that they can finally reach the wider audience that he deserves. I'll treasure my hardbacks, yet this is a good development. It would be good to see his Haunted River books similarly re-released. One interesting comment by Barbara: > ... Loaned a physical book to a friend so she could read it without having to buy it?... Well, this is exactly the one thing that I don't like about e-books: the digital rights management makes it usually impossible to loan an ebook to a friend. While I think that is an important social activity between book lovers. I am also not convinced that we'll be able to read these encrypted files forever. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.151.148.65 |
Most of the authors I read now, I read for the first time for free, borrowing books from friends, families, libraries. If not free then dirt cheap second hand editions. My biggest objection to e-books is that they completely remove the social aspect of reading. If you like a book you've read on a kindle, you can't just pass it over to a friend and say Read this. you have to persuade them to part with their money to buy a copy for themselves... which makes it less likely that recommendations will be followed and therefore less word of mouth exposure. Dammit. I was trying to keep out of this. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.80.28 |
Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you've been good.  | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.80.28 |
"That was rather bigger than I expected." -- Is there a CARRY ON CHRISTMAS? | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Weber: "Most of the authors I read now, I read for the first time for free, borrowing books from friends, families, libraries. If not free then dirt cheap second hand editions." I think that's part of the reason the Kindle is having such a seismic effect so quickly in publishing - the people using them do buy a lot of books. Weber: "My biggest objection to e-books is that they completely remove the social aspect of reading. If you like a book you've read on a kindle, you can't just pass it over to a friend and say Read this. you have to persuade them to part with their money to buy a copy for themselves... which makes it less likely that recommendations will be followed and therefore less word of mouth exposure." I don't think that's true. If I recommend a book on Kindle to someone, they can download the preview of it for free, which makes it easier if anything for word of mouth to have an effect. Last time I was at FantasyCon, I downloaded previews of many books mentioned by the panels. In the US you can loan people a copy of the book for a fortnight, and I'm sure that'll come to the UK at some point. And there's nothing to stop people from lending out their actual devices - I've got an old one that people have borrowed. And if I'm chatting to someone who is interested enough to buy a book on my recommendation, they can do it right there on their Kindle. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.156.32.78 |
Some interesting points made on this thread in toto. Like Joel, yesterday, I feel my mind gradually being changed and, of course, I hope what is envisaged above - by those who are ebook-friendly - is a reading revolution that comes to a happy fruition for us all. des | ||
| Matthew_fell (Matthew_fell) Username: Matthew_fell Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
For those who like this sort of thing: Reggie Oliver's MASQUES OF SATAN is now available as an eBook from Ash-Tree at www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm Happy Christmas! | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
Great to see Reggie Oliver's work get an opportunity to find a broader audience in an inexpensive format. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.37.147 |
Des, I was being playful – and referring to my post-Yuletide budget deficit – but it's not the existence of e-books that troubles me, it's the rapid extinction of the infrastructure of bookselling and book publishing, and e-books are simply one aspect of that process. It's not the next generation who will see the end of commercial book publishing, it's this one and in this decade. I've worked in commercial non-fiction publishing for twenty years and the imminent end of print publishing is absolutely taken for granted among the people I work with – and that includes people who've been in the field for much longer than I have. I don't think book publishing is dying just because of e-books, but they are a contributory factor and easy to blame. If there were a prospect of long-term coexistence I'd be perfectly happy, but the truth is there isn't. I'm going to stop attacking the concept of e-books, but I won't cease to lament the passing of the book as such. I strongly suspect that the e-book format is merely a transition between a literate culture and one in which books have no place, whether printed, digital, heard or remembered. People who buy e-books like books. That's a disappearing interest. However, we should not make the mistake of assuming that what happens in our culture defines the human experience. Across the developing world and many societies previously frozen by religious and secular dictatorships, political and cultural awareness is growing. Books are a fundamental part of that process. I don't think young intellectuals in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America or China are jaded, world-weary and introspective. They are hungry for powerful ideas that can help them change their lives and their societies – not necessarily in the direction of ours. The recent history of Russia has shown how the rapid imposition of free-market capitalism means mass starvation, gangsterism and sex trafficking. Another world is possible, and books are the building bricks of international consciousness (whereas blogs are merely grains of sand that wash away in the rain). Whether the books are encountered in printed or digital form is not the first issue, what matters is that they are read and continue to be written. For most of the world, that will surely be the case. We need to let go of the idea that Western Europe and the USA are in some way leading the world. It was never really true and now it is the opposite of the truth. While we bicker and mourn in the ruins of our culture, many millions of people are struggling to build a new world. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.121.79 |
I can only hope you're spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong about this, Joel. (Ease my mind: how often does that happen?) | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.18.70 |
Proto, it's not a personal opinion. At the end of 2010 the major UK publishers declared a fall in book sales of 20% relative to the previous year. How many years do you think that kind of collapse can be sustained? Come to my employer's board meetings and tell him and his directors that they are 'spectacularly wrong' about the industry they have each worked in for periods of time ranging from twenty to forty years. I'd love to be proved wrong alongside most people who work in the publishing industry. It would hardly embarrass me: I'd be far too happy to care. But it seems to me about as likely as global peace being declared this coming New Year's Day. As I said above, the end of literate culture in the west doesn't mean its end worldwide. Our post-reformist, last-stage capitalist society is coming to its ugly and vicious end,, but across much of the world new cultures and societies are growing, and literacy is a vital part of that. How often am I spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong? It depends on the context. In a purely personal context, several times a week. In the workplace context, about once a fortnight. In relation to major issues of a political or cultural nature, I don't often make predictions that are falsifiable in a Popperian sense. I'm more prone to making interpretations and value judgements, which can't be proven inaccurate though they can be (and have been) judged inappropriate by me and others. I don't really see the point of having a unique personal view for the sake of having a unique personal view. Surely it's more important to recognise objective reality than to say "I think the moon is a camouflaged spaceship because I like to think for myself." Some things are true though most people don't believe them; some things are true though most people do believe them. Life is too precious for our views on it to be personal: they have to be appropriate, useful and accurate. We build views and judgements, we don't void them. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.152.205.190 |
That's what I was afraid of. The best line in TITANIC is "This ship will sink. It is a mathematical certainty." How unused we've become to accepting difficult facts. We're saturated with capitalism which promises us that we can buy our way out of fundamental inevitabilities: unhappiness, ageing, death. As long as it's genuinely representative, one fact like the one you've mentioned carries more weight than all the pages of debate above. What worries me is the damage to our capacity for abstract thought. I'm sure everyone here has read 1984 and knows what implications this has. Even if we had the choice, I'm not so quick to throw away western society. For all its faults, it's given mankind most of the blessings of the 20th century. It's also given us democracy - in Platonic form and, to greater or lesser extent, in reality. I like it and feel its pillars should be righted again rather than toppled. I don't know how to do that (how would I?) but I think that the difficulty in doing something shouldn't affect our decision as to what is the right thing to do. A bit off topic here, but I'm part of the problem. I rarely read novels or even short stories for pleasure any more. What's going on if I'm on your side but can't or won't practice what I preach? Maybe I'm too visual a person, or maybe I'm representative of something larger, something lazier..? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.3 |
I buy hard copies of books that I like, then share my findings on the internet. I publish hard copies of books (only hard copies). This may sound like Canute, but it's a small step... | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Might be worth checking your Lulu publisher account, Des - a couple of your print-on-demand books have sneaked out as ebooks: http://twitpic.com/7zoh6b/full Or perhaps those ebooks have been retrocaused by a future change of heart..? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.3 |
Thanks, for looking into that for me, Stephen. That's a complete surprise to me. When Lulu first broached this a few months ago, I did specifically instruct them NOT to offer any ebook versions of the books I've published. I'll investigate and rectify, where necessary. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
At last, thanks to Joel's comments above, at least Proto is starting to agree with us (me, Des, Weber et al) and really see what's going on! It's not the fault of e-books per se, but e-books are part of the problem. Thanks, Joel, for putting it in words which people can understand! I don't think we can "stop the rot", and I don't think a boycot of e-books (either as readers, writers, publishers or editors) would help at all (though I don't intend to buy them myself as I simply enjoy real books too much for that), but it's good that people are finally recognising the problem and not poo-pooing it every time anyone mentions it. Yes, it's an absolute fact - real book sales are decreasing alarmingly, and bookshops and libraries are closing. A very sad state of affairs indeed imho. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.106.111 |
According to Martin Amis the death cults of nazism and extreme Islamism are marked by a severe downgrading of the value of human life and a proud rejection of logic and the rational. Is advanced capitalism a death cult? | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.106.111 |
A paper book has one function. eBooks (aarrgh, the enforced bad grammar!) could eventually cause reading to be lost in the haze of digital applications. Smartphones today are only incidentally telephones. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
The problem isn't the format a work of literature becomes avilable in, the problem is that too many people simply don't want to read. They'd rather watch The X Factor or fiddle about with smartphones and video games. Reading is now a niche pastime. Get used to it. Paper books will always be available, because of this wherever there's a demand there will always be a supply. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.106.111 |
You could be right in that the problem is that other, easier options are available now so it's not a mass medium any more. Computer games make more money than films now. Still, for those of us who enjoy the particular pleasures of reading (as opposed to having to read because it was the only way of getting a story) the paper option is becoming less available. It's almost Fahrenheit 451. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.203.189 |
Well said, Zed. There are a lot of naive comments posted on this subject, I must say. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Agreed, Huw. Guys, ebooks haven't made print books any less available. I've been moaning about expensive, limited edition only books for over a decade - well before ebooks were making any kind of impact. How many people do you know who read for pleasure? I knew a few. And they're all writers. What a sad sentence that is to have to write. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
How many people on this very message board actually support the indie presses (or the bigger publishers, for that matter) and buy newly published books? For example, Tony's often said that he never buys books written by people hw knows on here; Proto admits above that he no longer reads for pleasure; Craig's been known to say that he's tired of reading; Stevie only ever buys stuff from second-hand shops. Multiply that by a hundred, a thousand, a million...and you have a lot of people moaning about the perceived impact of ebooks while never (or rarely) even buying paper books themselves. I'm not having a go at any of the above, btw - just using their comments as an example of the bigger picture. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.183.126.98 |
I buy stuff by folk here - not every single work published but most. I think zed's quite right about it being more due to people not wanting to read. You never know, the advent of Kindle-like devices may tempt some folk back. On a personal level, I and most of my friends love reading, and none would consider, for a second, giving up for any reason. On the other hand, a friend now has a Kindle and she's reading fiction most days when previously she read very little throughout the year. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Yeah, I'm pretty bad, Zed. I'm both omnivorous and incredibly finicky in my reading; and yes, I get tired of reading too, which is an incredible frustration. If I read quicker.... (In that regard, though, I blame the writers, who aren't writing faster.) I definitely though do know people who read for pleasure, and they're not at all writers. So there's that. But enough to support mega-bookstores? That had popped up like mushrooms in this area? Absurd it was, at the time; now that they're gone, these surplus megastores, it certainly seems like a stupid idea they were ever there. Here's a notion: I always hear "Hollywood" (i.e., industry as a whole) complaining about the box-office returns (especially, of late), how they're way down; they muse upon it, wondering about the effects of video games, why 20-something men are staying away, about what days holidays land upon, the state of the economy, the glut perhaps of 3D, the now commonness of high-quality animated features, the fall of the A-list actor, and etc.... But guess what never ever seems to cross their minds about why box-office could be down? The quality of the films themselves, and that perhaps, they just plain suck-eth. However they're being delivered to us. Hmmm..... | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Well my copy of the Ritual that I'm reading at the moment was bought as part of a 3 for 2 in waterstone last year... I buy new books when I can afford to. I try out new authors normally through second hand or loans but once I decide I like someone I tend to buy new. (And I certainly don't class myself as a writer) | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
But enough to support mega-bookstores? That had popped up like mushrooms in this area? Absurd it was, at the time; now that they're gone, these surplus megastores, it certainly seems like a stupid idea they were ever there. That's a very interesting comment, Craig - and I feel there's a lot of truth in it. In my city alone we used to have 3 massive megabrand-bookstores and about 5 or 6 of those surplus bookstores. It was never going to last; declining readers, literacy levels going downhill; books becoming a niche market because of all the competition for people's time and money. Maybe the market hit saturation level and all this is the result. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Joel - I had a google but couldn't find an article saying that sales had dropped as much as 20% in 2010. Don't doubt you read it somewhere, but this article on the Bookseller suggests only a 4.3% fall in 2010, mainly down to bad weather and Borders closing: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/book-sales-2010-fall-more-3.html?quicktabs_1=1. McSweeney's 37 offered plenty of evidence to knock aside the idea that "reading is dying". It's not even on the ropes! In 2009-2010 adult literacy in the US was at an all-time high, as was library membership and library circulation. According to Nielsen, Americans bought 751,729,000 print books in 2010, down a little from 2008 and 2009, but that's still more than any other year on record. In comparison, just 650 million books were sold in 2005. And the 2010 figure doesn't even include ebooks - there's every chance that over a billion books were sold in the US in 2010. The weird thing about this conversation is how some have convinced themselves that the success of dedicated reading devices is a sign reading is in decline, rather than a clear demonstration of how much people adore reading, and want to do more of it. People don't buy iPods because they hate listening to music. Cheaply printed paperbacks may be on their way out, and publishers are in for a rough few years of adjustment, but the activity of reading is going from strength to strength, and when people do print books, they're putting in extra effort to make them objects worth owning. Apart from anything else, reading is still the main way we interact with the internet, and the most popular websites are virtually all sites you read. If everyone hated reading, Facebook would be empty, rather than one of the most popular websites in the world. Try going outside with a Kindle, and then tell me how unpopular reading is! Whether it's in the back of a taxi, or in a cafe, or sitting in Marks & Spencers while Ranjna tries on clothes, I cannot read in peace for more than five minutes without having to answer a bunch of questions about it. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Stephen - I'd like to see those figures broken down into fiction and non-fition. The general public seem to buy a lot of shitty celebrity books, TV tie-ins and ghost-written celebrity autobiographies and very little fiction. But, yeah, ebooks aren't killing reading. Anyone who thinks so is deluding themselves. | ||
| Matthew_fell (Matthew_fell) Username: Matthew_fell Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
Simon Kurt Unsworth's LOST PLACES joins the growing list of Ash-Tree Press eBooks. Now available at www.ash-tree.bc.ca for Kindle or ePub readers. Also available for Kindle via amazon. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.3 |
But, yeah, ebooks aren't killing reading. Anyone who thinks so is deluding themselves. -------------- I hope you're right becuase ebooks are in full tilt - no stopping them. However, it's not, I feel, a question of ebooks killing reading now; it's a question of ebooks killing reading sooner or later once the ebook novelty has gone and its problems realised and real books already sent into oblivion before this realisation comes home to roost. And, yes, you are quite right about reading statistics depending on what is counted as read. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
"Cheaply printed paperbacks may be on their way out, and publishers are in for a rough few years of adjustment, " Which means that the main source of my reading is in danger unless I buy one of those cheap looking, overpriced, fiddly and nasty pieces of plastic. I have tried using a kindle now and really disliked it. I don't want to be forced into buying a device I don't like because there's no other way to keep up with my favourite writers. Lets face it, it's already started with the "NEW IMPROVED KINDLE! BUY IT NOW AND REPLACE THE ONE YOU BOUGHT ONLY A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO OR PEOPLE WILL POINT AT YOU AND LAUGH!!!" that accompanies all electronic gizmos. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
"However, it's not, I feel, a question of ebooks killing reading now; it's a question of ebooks killing reading sooner or later once the ebook novelty has gone and its problems realised and real books already sent into oblivion before this realisation comes home to roost." I don't think real books are going to be sent into oblivion anytime soon. Overall sales of physical books might decline as e-readers gain in popularity, but demand for physical books will never go away. And it's not as if all the books that exist in the world are going to be vaporised, or otherwise disappear off the face of the earth, one night while no one's watching. Seattle - to name just one city - has dozens of secondhand bookstores, between them containing hundreds of thousands of books, many of them decades, if not more than a century, old (I've been able to build up a pretty complete, very inexpensive library of John Buchan titles by trolling secondhand bookstores and snapping up decades-old hardcovers for about a fiver each). E-books won't "kill off" physical books; they can, and will, exist alongside them. Anecdotal evidence from readers of e-books suggests that e-readers encourage people to read, and buy, more than they used to; and surely it's the content, not the form in which it's delivered, that's important (otherwise we'd all be reading handbound letterpress editions, rather than trade or mass market paperbacks). | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
I hope you're right, Barbara. But there's something tangible and nostalgic and memorable about real books - and my experience of your Northwest book (its actual meaning, too) was enhanced by its physical format. But if ebooks go forward the way they are going forward - and ignoring, just for the sake of argument, the cultural piracy or plagiarism induced by any electonic format (a common sense observation, even if it's a specious argument) - why should real books prevail or even continue to exist? That makes no sense. They have nothing to offer but intrusive space or weight or clutter! | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Gary, bad books are nothing new - how many millions did the Confessions series sell in the seventies? Or Jackie Collins in the eighties? Are things really that much worse today? The current bestseller on Amazon is The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, which hardly sounds like lowest common denominator stuff. Weber, if you're only reading secondhand books, you're like a mouse worrying that the wrong kind of crumbs are going to be dropped from the table... You have to encourage publishers to produce the kind of books you want to see by spending your money on them. I certainly do. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
Des, there will ALWAYS be people who feel strongly about physical books, and who want to have them around; either as a massed rank of objects, or because they want certain books in a physical edition (so they can have them signed by the author; because they want to continue/complete a run of books; because the books are heavily illustrated and they want to be able to better appreciate the illustrations; because they want physical copies of particularly treasured titles). | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.155.217.24 |
Steve - look at my post at 3:31 today. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
>>Des, there will ALWAYS be people who feel strongly about physical books,<< I'm not sure that's true for the next generation. If younger folk are being brought up with e-readers, they won't necessarily know the joy of real books like those of us who were brought up with those do. I guess someone, at some point, probably said "there will always be people who feel strongly about vinyl" too - but that didn't stop the huge changes in the way we listen to music. This thread/whole argument is very strange. Views seem so entrenched on both sides of the argument. I *can* see the good in ebooks (eg. for the arguments made above that people are reading who wouldn't necessarily buy/read a paper book, it makes some authors' works more readily accessible, etc), but I just can't understand how some of you don't seem to be able to see what's going on in the world of writing/publishing/reading when it's right under your noses. Real, physical books, bookshops and libraries are disappearing before our very eyes. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
I agree with Caroline. All my life, I've continuously stood on my own shoulders to forge new ideas and to beat old traditionalisms (as many of you can hopefully attest) - but somewhere in my heart I think I know this ebook revolution is wrong. A revolution too far. Only an old revolutionary can recognise false revolutions? I don't know. Nobody is all-seeing. I hope all your dreams come true. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
We'll have to agree to disagree, Des. Where I live, I don't see real books or bookshops disappearing, and as far as libraries go, there's a new one being built six miles up the road in Cache Creek. Humans will always want to read, and physical books will always be around for those who want them. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.183.126.98 |
some point, probably said "there will always be people who feel strongly about vinyl" too - but that didn't stop the huge changes in the way we listen to music. Well yes, but vinyl and record players are still available, in the same way that I believe books will still be available; not necessarily in millions of sales but still at a decent level. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Real, physical books, bookshops and libraries are disappearing before our very eyes. With great respect, Caroline - that has fuck-all to do with ebooks. Bookshops were disappearing long before ebooks entered the equation (independant bookshops were killed off by Waterstones and Borders in the same way that Starbucks killed off cafes and coffeeshops in our major cities). Libraries are being shut down by the current fuckwit government; chain bookshops are disappearing because, frankly, there were too many of them anyway (Leeds alone used to have two massive Waterstones and a huge Borders within a square half mile) and consumer demands have changed - the same thing happened to the HMV type video-DVD shops. Mick - Vinyl records are actually fashionable again, too. I've even heard of some bands releasing records only on vinyl and digital formats. Des - the next generation? My son loves his books more than anything else he owns. I remember Stephen Theaker saying something similar about his kids. My boy even sleeps with his books. We who love books hopefully pass on that love - in the same way that I inherited my love of reading from my mother (who only ever reads library books; I don't think she's ever bought a book in her life). "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Caroline, let's say the shoe was on the other foot, and switching to ebooks would save the jobs of all the warehouse workers, lorry drivers and booksellers the publishing industry no longer needs. Would that be enough to make you switch to ebooks? Or would you say, no, sorry, I much prefer the smell and feel of print books, sorry about your jobs but I'm going to stick with them? People buy the things they like and enjoy using. I still buy CDs, not to keep CD pressing plants operational and record shops open, but because CDs suit me better. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.14.74 |
Stephen – I can't remember where I read the 20% figure but 4.3% sounds more credible, though obviously pretty disturbing in itself – it suggests that bookshops have maybe a decade left, rather than maybe a year. "Seattle - to name just one city - has dozens of secondhand bookstores, between them containing hundreds of thousands of books, many of them decades, if not more than a century, old." Barbara, that's true of only two places in the UK now: London (where such bookshops are closing at a very rapid rate) and Hay-on-Wye, a small rural town whose main business is second-hand books. Twenty years ago Birmingham (the UK's second largest city) had maybe two dozen second-hand bookshops. Ten years ago it had maybe a dozen. Now it has two, neither of them antiquarian bookshops: one is an Oxfam bookshop (where the books have been donated and are sold very cheap) and the other is Reader's World (also very cheap and specialising in old porn magazines). I used to visit two excellent second-hand bookshops regularly in Birmingham. Both have closed in the last five years, and nothing like them remains any nearer than Warwick (maybe forty miles away). | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Gary - just today our eight-year-old daughter used our living room to create an exhibition of her Rainbow Magic books... She's read all of those she owns except the three she got for Christmas, and she's given them all five stars on Goodreads. Love her enthusiasm. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
In ten years, we shall all come back here. And compare notes. At least there will be less assassinations - if the John Lennon one depended on someone carrying a book around with him. Or each person with a Kindle will commit a million assassinations if he or she carries a million books? | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Joel - I was really disappointed by Birmingham's lack of secondhand bookshops when I moved here from Reading. Sounds like they closed before I found them! Used to like Andromeda's sf section, but it was too expensive for me back then, and whenever I left without buying anything I felt so guilty that I stopped going in... | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.122.74 |
"I can't remember where I read the 20% figure but 4.3% sounds more credible, though obviously pretty disturbing in itself – it suggests that bookshops have maybe a decade left, rather than maybe a year." Joel, that's a huge difference. What's the standard deviation year on year? A 20% drop would be almost certainly significant, but 4% drop is meaningless if it's within the random noise of year-by-year fluctuations. This is the problem with this subject - lack of solid data. A long debate usually indicates that insufficient data are available. If they were, there would be no debate. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Proto - agreed. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
Vancouver used to have a ton of secondhand bookstores clustered around the north end of the Granville Street bridge; but they've been gone for the better part of two decades. Whatever's causing the death of secondhand bookstores started a long, long time before e-books came on the scene. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
The Internet has basically replaced the second-hand bookshop these days. I buy all mine from Amazon sellers. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
Same here, Gary. If I want a secondhand book, nine times out of ten I buy it on ABE. Takes the fun out of the chase, of course, but on the plus side it means I can get the book I want, when I want/need it, rather than searching for 20 years and hoping I find it. That said, whenever we go to Vancouver I usually manage to visit MacLeod's, a wonderful secondhand bookstore that's going as strong as ever, and rarely come away empty-handed, and visits to Seattle usually mean visiting up to a dozen secondhand bookstores. | ||
| Matthew_fell (Matthew_fell) Username: Matthew_fell Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
I don't buy the argument that the closure of second-hand bookstores is down to a lack of readers. Of course I don't have figures to support the argument, but I'd wager that more second-hand stores close because they can no longer afford the exorbitant rents they are being charged for a shopfront than do through declining reader numbers. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Zed, I think the megastores were an effect of the "froth" of the last decade. People with too-big houses needed, obviously, to go to too-big bookstores too, right? Here, these mega-bookstores swept in, killing smaller speciality bookstores (gems like world-famous sci-fi/fantasy/horror little book shops, like Santa Monica's A Change of Hobbit or the Valley's Dangerous Visions, gone forever now); them themselves, vanishing, leaving these giant skeleton eyesores behind. The same thing happened with the sweep of Starbucks, which deliberately targeted areas to expand near tiny indie coffee shops; those little cafes all went away, then many Starbucks went away when there were too many of them to support. It's a pretty disgusting aspect of capitalism, but I guess there's not much to be done about it, really.... | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Yes, yes, I'm not disputing these arguments at all. If you read my posts you'll see that I said "ebooks are part of the problem, not the cause". In fact, to be clearer, I should have said "digitisation of books is part of the problem" as that's what I'm really talking about here. In my opinion real books are dying because of several things: - loss of independent bookshops, and now closure of big chains too (there, you see, I'm agreeing with you) - closure of libraries due to government cuts (agreeing with you again) - poor education/literacy levels - digitisation of books, making it too easy for people to illegally download (ie. steal) books rather than buy their own As I've said above too, of course ebooks have their good points. They encourage some people to read who wouldn't normally do so, if they like these kind of gadgets. They make some people's work more easily accessible (eg. Reggie Oliver). They have good points, of course they do - but they're not for me. I'm still mourning the slow but sure death of my beloved paper books. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I'm not mourning the death of books - I buy more paper books than ever before. I currently own more books than I'll ever be able to read, but I still spend around 50 quid a month on paper books. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the fate of real books, Zed! Meanwhile, it looks like the iPad has found a useful purpose in life: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16354093 | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
I especially like the bit where it says that one orang-utang likes watching David Attenborough programmes! | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
Simon Kurt Unsworth's LOST PLACES joins the growing list of Ash-Tree Press eBooks. Now available at www.ash-tree.bc.ca for Kindle or ePub readers ================= My real-time review of this book in September 2010: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/lost-places-by-simon-kurt-unswort h/ | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
“‘Ma’am, I just want to know if the library is still–’ / “It’s been closed for years and all the books are gone.” – from 11.22.63 by Stephen King (2011) | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Here's a 1/2 year-old post (5/22/11) about e-/publishing from James Altucher's site, that might be relevant. And inspiring (I recommend browsing all of his site!), despite this key paragraph: The book publishing industry is dead and they don’t know it. Its like how the typewriter industry died. And how companies like Blockbuster and Borders can’t survive. And the entire music industry is dying. And broadcast television might be on the way.... http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/05/why-and-how-i-self-published-a-book/ | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
Using an established publisher would’ve taken over a year. Incorrect. The publishing industry does minimal editing. Not in my experience. ...makes zero sense in a print-on-demand world when kindle versions are outselling print versions. Figures, please? I could go on... I'm very, very wary of these Kindle zealots. A lot of them keep banging on about how the publishing industry is dead, about how many copies they sell and how much money they're making. Here's my little ebook publishing experience: the Kindle edition of one of my small press titles (In the Skin) got into the Amazon horror top 10 by selling 21 copies. It's all hype and hot air. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
Just for comparison purposes, we've sold 31 paperback copies of Terror Tales of the Lake District through Amazon alone. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
Gray Friar Press hasn't done ebooks, but when I offered Bram Stoker voters a free electronic copy of Lisa Morton's novel THE CASTLE OF LOS ANGELES, eight people requested it. The paperback has sold nearly 200 copies. Just some of my non-speculative experience. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
Here's another relevant experience: when I did a Xmas paperback chapbook in 2009 with a print run of 50, I offered a copy to anyone who bought two or more GFP books. They were all snapped in two weeks. The year later, I offered a free electronic version to anyone who bought one or more GFP books. That resulted in about 15 sales (some of which I'm convinced were just folk buying a book who didn't know about the deal). Go figure. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.13.150 |
A few months ago, I heard a well-known and prolific children's author (whom I won't name because he doesn't necessarily want his business shared online) say at a literary festival event that in recent years he's had to return to teaching, because his income per book is a third of what it used to be. My impression from talking to writers is that most of them would say much the same. A successful horror writer told me the publishing industry has been damaged beyond recognition in the last two years. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.13.150 |
P.S. Obviously e-books are not to blame for this situation. But any discussion of e-books as the future of commercial publishing has to take on board that there is no such thing: e-books are no more the future of commercial publishing than they are unicorns, shoggoths, altruistic HR managers or magnificent albums by Gareth Gates. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.82.65 |
Again, I think this is advanced capitalism. I remember being told back in economics class in school that the future (i.e., now) will be about leisure. But it's clear that can never happen in a capitalist system as it thrives on competition, so good enough will never be good enough, and there will never be any rest. Are we looking at the death of the professional vocation? Unless you're directly involved in generating profit, your activities are deemed expendable. Music, writing and art will only exist as hobbies, or at best supplements to income. Nursing and teaching next. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I think, Gary, the guy's just selling more online books. It's no more complicated than that. Let's see, horror vs. self-help... it's a no-brainer which is going to move more product. Just the way it is, the way it's always been. I know someone who made up, out of whole cloth, a "recipe" for passing drug-tests - you know, like when an employer says they need a drug test, and you've been smoking dope every day for the last 10 years, and so you need to do something about it, and stat? Well, reasoning that all the providers of such product were cheats and charlatans anyway, he decided he may as well get in on that action; so he just made up a silly recipe from things found in any kitchen. That's how he marketed it. Then, he advertised it via youtube, send like $40 to a paypal account and he'd forward the phony info: an e-pamphlet, if you will. He swiftly made just over $2k in these e-transactions before shutting it down finally, feeling guilty (probably, nervous about getting caught, too). There are more people out there who need to pass drug tests than read horror, too. | ||
| Protodroid (Protodroid) Username: Protodroid Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.79.14.82 |
"horror vs. self-help" Same thing? "nervous about getting caught, too" No kidding. He better hope the police get him first. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
In six weeks I've sold 100 copies of my book of Holmes pastiches through Amazon, and sales are holding steady, day after day. I suspect - and I only have 16 years of publishing/bookselling experience to back this up - if I'd released the same book as a paperback, selling for @$26.00 including postage, there'd have been an initial take-up of about 60 copies, and then sales numbers would've taken a nosedive, as the initial demand was satisfied. As it is, I expect that sales will continue at a steady rate, as more people hear about it and - importantly - feel that at $6.99, and available instantly, it's something they can and will purchase. Plus the revenue generated from the e-book sales makes it more likely that we will, at some point, produce a physical version for people who want a book to put on their shelf. Put another way: without the e-book version, there'd be no possibility of a p-book version; it simply wouldn't make economic sense. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.28.26 |
Barbara, if finance were less an issue would you rather publish the hard copy first and then follow up with the e-book to gain a second tranche of sales? My concern about bringing out the e-book first would be that it reduces the potential demand for the hard copy. But the sales environment is icy, there's no denying that, and publishers have to steer close to the wind in cost control terms. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
Ideally, yes, Joel; I'd rather publish the hard copy first, and then bring out the e-book (or at least bring them out more or less concurrently). However, as things stand at the moment we can't afford to do things that way. And really, apart from the four extra stories in Steve's collection, everything else we've brought out under the ATP imprint is precisely the same content as books that are already available: no new or additional material, just titles we've previously published as physical books, now available in e-book format, which will (it's hoped) be attractive to people who can't afford/don't want $45.00 (and up) hardcovers. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.59.249 |
According to the Kindle company more than four million Kindle readers and tablets have been sold over the Xmas periode alone. The most popular thingy is their Kindle Fire, which is seen as the strongest contender for the iPad. The Kindle Fire is not yet on sale in Europe. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
>>>I suspect - and I only have 16 years of publishing/bookselling experience to back this up - if I'd released the same book as a paperback, selling for @$26.00 including postage, there'd have been an initial take-up of about 60 copies, and then sales numbers would've taken a nosedive, as the initial demand was satisfied. It must differ between publishers. GFP has had one or two books flounder around that mark, but a solid paperback collection of a modestly well-known, gifted writer can sell much more than 60. For example, around 130 copies of Simon Bestwick's Pictures of the Dark were sold in the first few months. I have no experience of ebooks, just PDF freebies. Maybe more Bestwicks would have sold if I'd chosen that format. I don't know. It's just me feeling as if it doesn't feel like proper publishing. God knows it would be far easier. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
It's just me feeling as if it doesn't feel like proper publishing. God knows it would be far easier. ----------------------- You said it, Gary. Happy New Year to you - and to everyone. 2020 vision - we'll all be back with real books, I predict. | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
The operative word in that sentence is 'can', I think, Gary. I like to think that I'm a modestly well-known, decent writer, and that as far as Sherlockian pastiche goes I'm a) well-known as a Sherlockian/Doylean and b) known as someone who can write good pastiche. However, the fact remains that the Sherlockian world is different to the horror world, in that it's more specific, based as it is around one central writer/character, and there's a more marked resistance to buying books, possibly because there's so much bad pastiche out there. A parallel might be if the horror world was just HPL as the begetter, and everything else was HPL pastiche. A good collection of HPL pastiche would have to struggle to rise above the dreck, fighting for attention amid all the other works out there on the same topic. Plus there are far fewer Sherlockians out there than there are horror enthusiasts, so the market is that much smaller, and widely spread. I guess e-books don't count as 'proper' publishing, if by 'proper' you mean 'something physical to hold at the end of the process'. However, I don't know that it's 'far easier'. In that you don't have to post physical books to people, with all the time and effort that entails, then yes, it's easier. However, as I'm sure you know, making sure the files are properly formatted, laid out, free of typos, pleasing to the eye, easy to read, etc., is as difficult, tedious, and time-consuming as it is for a physical book. Moreover, it's a process that has to be done IN ADDITION TO preparing said files for a print book; it's not as if you take the files you've got ready for the printer and simply hit a button to make an e-book. Again, I'm sure you know this; it's more for the benefit of people who aren't sure how the process works. I suspect there's a widespread belief, among many readers, that preparing e-books is easy-peasy, quick and easy. I guess it can be, if you don't mind the end result looking like a dog's breakfast. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
It's easier in the sense that it is always correctable - make a mistake with a delivery of books and you're stymied. But, of course, there's is nothing necessarily wrong in something being easy in itself, I agree. But in my experience, worthwhile things are difficult to create - involving time and capital outlay. des | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Gary - worth bearing in mind that Kindle has only been properly out in the UK for a year. In the US it's been out since 2007, so the market for ebooks over there is much better developed. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
Then I'm not sure what your example was intending to demonstrate vis a vis the topic of this thread. Most books published are not of this ilk. Do you mean that only books of this ilk will nosedive in paperback versions at 60 copies? If so, does that mean that less specialised texts might sell more in paperback format than e-format? Or if not, are you suggesting that all books function at an ebook-to-paperback ratio of 100/60 - so if I'd released Bestick's book in e-format, I'd have shifted around 200 in the early stages? Forgive confusion. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
>>>making sure the files are properly formatted, laid out, free of typos, pleasing to the eye, easy to read, etc., is as difficult, tedious, and time-consuming as it is for a physical book. I find all this process creatively fulfilling. It's the distribution I really struggle with. It's a real drag. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
>>>Gary - worth bearing in mind that Kindle has only been properly out in the UK for a year. In the US it's been out since 2007, so the market for ebooks over there is much better developed. Well, this may be true. But the fact remains that I made the e-version of Morton's Castle novel widely available in the States and only eight folk wanted it. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
And that was FREE. Paperback sales = approx. 200. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
It's the distribution I really struggle with. It's a real drag. ------------ Me, too. After, 11 years of experience., that seems to be a big % of the job of 'creating' a book. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
HNY, Des! | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
What I'm trying to say, Gary, is that my experience with publishing a physical book, of any kind, is that upon initial release there is a large (or largeish) immediate take-up: the book is out there, there's been some publicity, people who could be expected to want the book know it's there, and they buy it. After this initial surge in sales, though - which varies in number from book to book, depending on a number of factors, including desirability of the book, cost of the book, how much publicity there's been, how much awareness there is of it amongst the audience who'd want it - things will quieten down immensely. Yes, there will be a certain number of ongoing sales, as people who didn't initially hear about it find out it's available, and word of mouth does its thing, and people save up the money, and dealers re-order in ones and twos. However, if you graphed the sales, there'd be a huge spike on release, followed by a plummet, and then a more or less flat line. With my Holmes e-book, there was no huge initial spike; what there has been, over the six-and-a-bit weeks it's been out, is a very steady continual sell-through, as people continue to find it, and (I presume) decide that at $5.99, and available immediately, it's worth their money. Would people be reaching this same conclusion with a physical book that would cost them more than four times as much (including postage), and for which they'd have to wait some considerable time? Obviously I can't answer this definitively; but my experience over many years suggests the answer is no. The book would have been released, sold well enough initially as those who wanted it and knew about it bought it, and then demand would have dropped off quite considerably and sales would slow dramatically from what they were on publication. As I said, it's only been a bit more than six weeks since the book came out. However, the pattern of sales for this book is different to the pattern of sales I've seen for the almost 200 physical books we've published over the past seventeen years. The only possible exception I can think of is James's Pleasing Terror, which had large initial sales and then kept selling steadily. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.31.30.158 |
Yes, that's my experience, too: the huge sales spike and then slow to a trickle. You make an interesting observation about ebooks potentially having a different sales profile. Good luck with it! | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.157.25.212 |
An estimated fifth of ebook downloads come from illegal file-sharing sites, according to a major article, I understand, in the Sunday Times today about ebook piracy etc. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
Oh, Des. Nice to see you starting 2012 like you mean to go on. And on.  | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.131.175.211 |
Not my fault the Sunday Times came up with this today. It's probably quite positive for ebooks that it's only a fifth so far. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.29.234 |
The sales pattern varies according to genre. With vampire romance you get a slow buildup to a final big spike, usually with a few little spikes along the way. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.183.126.98 |
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| Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.166.73 |
Speaking personally- I've bought far fewer print books from Ash-Tree, even though there were a lot of titles I coveted, largely because of price. ATP's books are beautiful, but there's only so much I can spend on books per month. Today, though, I downloaded four of their ebook titles onto the Kindle I got for Xmas- two Duffys, an Oliver and a Burrage. And there will probably be more to come. Gray Friar's books are just as high in quality, but more affordable in print form- so I'm probably more likely to grab a print copy. I know I'd love to see Paul Finch's Ash-Tree collection come out in ebook form, and I'm looking forward to the future Burrage ebooks. Not just because I can afford them, but because people interested in the genre will actually be able to get hold of some very worthwhile stuff quite cheaply.* *(And yes, if anyone feels like putting in a word for an ebook edition of A Hazy Shade of Winter, feel free to do so!) } | ||
| Matthew_fell (Matthew_fell) Username: Matthew_fell Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.188.106 |
Simon: Paul Finch's books will be coming out as eBooks quite soon. Email me direct about Hazy Shade. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 27.252.219.92 |
A friend sent me a Kindle and I'm rather thankful. Paperbacks are twice the price in NZ. about £14 for a book which would cost £8-£10 back home. Postage to here is high, too. I haven't got a credit card either. We've started on the free books and I've just down loaded Bram Stoker's Dracula for Heather and she'll read it tonight. No classics in our NZ library. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 27.252.219.92 |
I hasten to add we have a copy of Dracula (physical copy) but it has been buried in one of more than one dozen boxes since March and won't emerge until next March.... | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.28.155 |
It's emerged already, Allyson. The first night you were there. Didn't you notice those stains on the box? Same thing happened when Gary moved to Whitby. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 27.252.219.92 |
He'll get us anywhere we go, Joel :>). | ||
| David_lees (David_lees) Username: David_lees Registered: 12-2011 Posted From: 92.22.28.28 |
I thought this might be of interest, it's a recent blog post by the comedian Richard Herring which talks (eventually) about publishing using Kindle versus the traditional method: http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/?id=3354 | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
... And I thought this slight bit might be off-handedly interesting: Andrew Sullivan giving a brief opinion recently on publishing: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/01/ask-me-anything-what-do-i-think- of-the-book-publishing-industry.html | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
The tsunami looms... or is crashing in already?... http://img.ibtimes.com/www/articles/20120119/284470_apple-kills-textbook-ibooks- 2-author.htm From the article: "... As expected, Apple also launched a new app to write and publish books, called iBooks Author.... Any kind of book you can think of, you can build with iBooks Author. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, text is easy to place and alter, and it automatically wraps around media like pictures and movies, which you can resize on the fly. If you wrote your original document in Microsoft Word, iBooks Author quickly scans the pages for style and automatically lays out sections and headers for the book.... "Not sure how your book looks? The incredible preview feature in iBooks Author allows the user to build the book in real-time and see it right on the iPad. They can also publish the book directly to the iBookstore directly from the app. " 'It is the most advanced, most powerful, yet most fun e-book authoring tool ever created,' Schiller said.... "Schiller added that in order to get this into the hands of every author, iBooks 2 and iBooks Author are both free apps on the Mac App Store starting Thursday." | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Really, there's a furious battle between these two titans, going on only right now, for this e-publishing world. It's just started: we are witnesses to something brand new on the scene, 2012-new. And the weapons these two mega-corps (Amazon & Apple, as I see it) are using, is providing free, easy-to-use, gold-rush incentives to every last aspiring author everywhere... it's the youtube-iz-ation of publishing, or trying to be... which means the inevitable flood of junk, of course... and deafening white noise.... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.145.243 |
I don't understand any of this. But it sounds bad. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Des! Yes, it could be bad, but I think you should embrace it, wrestle it, rather than avoid it. Here's what's happened, as I see it, and I might be wrong on things so others correct me: Amazon and Apple are both perceiving an opening market in e-books. They both anticipate it becoming gigantic. It will be facilitated by devices like the iPad, the Kindle, the Fire, and others coming, or not yet invented. The millions of Kindles/Fires sold over Xmas, as well as the millions of iPads sold in 2011 (and they're furiously I hear manufacturing a whole new amazing iPad in China as we speak...), is evidence for both companies. Now then: Des, you. You need to not resist. You need to go right now, to the Apple apps store, and download these new free apps. You need to sit down and learn them backwards and forwards. Then you need to publish your next anthology, or book, or collection, or magazine, in the Apple store. And, you need to do one too/as well for the Amazon store. And soon! The epub method with Amazon is simple, but complex, because you had to understand the formatting and the programs needed - Apple, again (I'm guessing), has perceived how someone else (e.g., back in the day with Microsoft) is making things too complicated for users that want simplicity. I'm guessing these new free Apple apps, are going to be wonders of simplicity, and even more so, versatility and advancement. And right now is the very first time anyone's had these tools. You need to, Des, put your misgivings aside, download those apps, learn them, and exploit them! You've always been cutting-edge in these things, with blogs and online promotion, etc. Stop fighting against Big Brother now... embrace Big Brother, love Big Brother... who is always holding up 5 fingers.... If Joel is willing to put an e-book out there (yay!), you need to too! | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.155.217.108 |
But surely this is just going to lead to such a glut of self published crap that it'll be almost impossible to fing the good stuff by new writers. We say that 95% of books are crap now. That's going to rise to 99.95% with all the Nick Pacciones suddenly thinking that because they can format their crap with these tools that it makes them all the next Lovecraft/Cartland/whichever writer they idolise. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Weber, you can stand on the shore and order the tide away. Good luck. Most of new medium product is crap. But there's always some work that separates itself from the fray. Some of that is the new—the new-on-the-scene always gets a burst of speed for being new (e.g., "S*%$ My Dad Says" was a Twitter page that got lots of viewers and got produced as a TV show—but Twitter was new, and it won't happen again, I bet; e.g., Diablo Cody was discovered by a trolling industry manager at a "hip" management company, looking for interesting bloggers to exploit—he stumbled across Dablo's, about stripping, then nabbed and heavily promoted her to her eventually success... but that was in 2003, when blogging was brand new and wow... again, can't see that happening again...). But after the new-ness fades, quality rises, helped by self-promotion. If you're an author with quality product, and a head for self-promotion (let alone, a built-in audience already!), you don't need publishers anymore to get published, to wait to get published, or to eventually share your earned $$$ (or £££).... That's both of you, Garys 1 and 2. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.159.145.243 |
Yes, I've always been cutting-edge, I hope. But I am not convinced by any of this. The only way to stop this tide is for all of us to stand by the phsyical book, eschew electronicisation and use the book as ha-ha or bastion. (I regret starting the Weirdmonger Wheel is 2004. I feel as if I am half to blame). | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Simple answer: Do both. The physical book isn't going away. So... do both. Again, I don't mean to be anything more than purely definitional by, in this regard, pointing out: Joel does, Ramsey does, etc. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I downloaded it, iBooks Author. I opened it. I gave it a cursory look-over. I dunno. But wow, I think this is big. Big indeed.... | ||
| Ziwxbeheld (Ziwxbeheld) Username: Ziwxbeheld Registered: 08-2011 Posted From: 188.220.132.39 |
I recently bought Obsession, Dark Companions and The Seven Days of Cain in ebook format, and I'm assuming, not unreasonably, that Ramsey got some money from this - Samhain Publishing are an excellent outfit, and it's great to see they're publishing excellent horror. What was that - three titles? It's worth wondering, then, how I might have purchased these books otherwise, in a way which would also recompense the author? Many Campbell books are out of print and, whilst readily available, do not serve to provide a living for Ramsey unless they inspire the purchase of newly-published editions. Add to this that, in fact, I prefer eBooks (and I'm sure I'm not alone). I own paper copies of The Grin Of The Dark and Thieving Fear, yet read the local library's eBook versions on my iPad. Is it electronic libraries that are the problem - they buy the books once and use them too much? How do libraries normally work, then? Is it that an electronic copy of a book never wears out, whilst a normal one does? This isn't easily rationalised - we have to consider what is being bought: the text of the book or the physical material. How many re-readings is reasonable of a book sale? How many times can a used book be re-used? Is it wrong that an ebook purchase may be re-read infinitely, whilst a physical purchase of (for example) the short picture book 'The Gruffalo' may, from experience, be re-read approximately one half-year's worth of bedtimes before a new copy is necessary, unless one wishes to unadvisedly attempt the W. S. Burroughs cut-up version of The Gruffalo (which, it has to be said, makes slightly more sense than The Naked Lunch, if only because it's shorter and less rambly.) Back to reality - when a book wears out, the question is raised: did one buy the story, or the materials? If it were the story, then one is due for a new copy, and if it were the materials then one really should choose a better medium for one's precious story - one should surely and wisely plump for the electronic version in which the materials do not wear out. eBooks offer this. Why is that bad? On a related note, I recently had to have a second hand copy of Creatures of The Pool shipped here to the UK from the USA because it's not available here. I didn't want a paperback, I wanted to buy it for my iPad, but whilst there are eBook versions available, I can't have them because of where I live. So here we are - I have a copy of the book here in the house, a paperback, but I can't have it on my iPad. What's going on there, and - as a special aside - what money did Ramsey get from that whole affair anyway? The book is second hand, found its way across the atlantic, and the eBook versions which would have recompensed the author isn't available for me to pay for. I hope I raise more questions than I answer. (Obsession was great, by the way. Good one, Ramsey - I had to revise my top five order of novel excellence to The Grin Of The Dark, Ancient Images, Obsession, Midnight Sun, The Hungry Moon. Not that I keep a big chart in my bedroom with dark anti-gold stars or anything…) | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9688435.stm | ||
| Lincoln (Lincoln_brown) Username: Lincoln_brown Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 143.238.239.100 |
'transmedia', 'a story told on many different platforms'. Is this really what fiction readers want, whether you're an ebook user or not? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
Not really, I guess, Lincoln, but ebook-pushers are part of the relentless drive towards that end (and other ends like plagiarism and piracy). Perhaps, I should also be questioning myself, having once been derided about the philosophy of 'Nemonymous', 'Weirdmonger Wheel' etc? | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.131.108.59 |
A writer - Sam Stone - on FB was saying the other day she knew someone who had been pirated, but that she was still about to Kindle. Sometimes, when we need money, our options change. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.1.209 |
Craig, there is indeed now an e-book version of The Earth Wire available. That was a decision on my part to accept an offer from a reputable publisher (Ash-Tree Press), at a time when publishers and readers alike are under great economic pressure, to reissue the book in a far cheaper format than their print publications. It wasn't a matter of choosing the electronic format over the print format, it was a matter – for me and for ATP – of adopting a strategy suited to the challenge of a second edition. Small press publishers know second editions well. They get to know them well through filling their houses with boxes of unsold copies of them. Both electronic publishing and POD publishing are radically different from traditional publishing and have to be approached with caution. I'm arguing for a pragmatic rather than a categorical stance. And I'm very wary of self-publishing. The publishing industry developed in the 19th century because the self-publishing (and publishing by patrons) model was profoundly inadequate. A return to that as the norm, however technologically mediated, would not be healthy. So I'm happy about the electronic edition of The Earth Wire, I like the way it looks and I hope people enjoy it. What matters for me is a commitment on behalf of publishers to literary standards and appropriate ways of working with authors and doing business with readers. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Joel, I don't know much about it all, but I do think the e-book "revolution" potentially opens up the rich world of OOP materials, much the way home video opened up the world of long-forgotten films. That's the exciting thing about it all.... But I'm of two minds. Just like with the breakdown of visual entertainment - the proliferation of cheap cameras, the ready platforms for distribution, etc. - this opening of the floodgates in (e-)publishing, is both exhilarating, and depressing. The good thing is anyone can do it now; the bad thing is, anyone can do it now. And what I fear is the Myspace example vis-a-vis music (as I saw it): nothing but musicians and musicians and musicians, and no listeners; it helped hasten the death of Myspace... and did nothing for the musicians, of course. Alas, those poor, poor San Fernando Valley Satanic death-metal garage bands.... About that BBC report, Des... um, in Britain, is that a cultural thing? Do 40-something mothers still read bedtime books to their 20-something daughters before they go to sleep at night?... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
Yes, Transmedia is a fun and/or potentially and seriously creative avenue. It fits in with my own past 'Nemonymous', 'Wordhunger', 'Weirdmonger Wheel' ideas and others' shared worlds etc. But I've always seen *the book* as a complete entity. Something posited in the audience arena - tangible - untouchable except by the physical hand - unplagiarisable - mostly (unless with some deliberate malice) unpiratable - and, although beyond the control of its author once posited in that arena, expandable by the special imagination of each reader and not as a viral public multimedia (although, as I have said, above, Transmedia has a lot of potential in itself but not as something eating away gradually at *the book* in our hands). | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.170.13 |
I used to read to my kids till fairly recently, and still do when we're camping. This feels like the bit in the movie 2012, when they realise the world's back at year zero. A scary watershed but one in which surely...um...ah... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
As a point separate from the points made above about TRANSMEDIA, I do agree with "a scary watershed". Ebookery makes it much easier to pirate and almost felt to be guiltless (in the minds of those doing it). [CF: Musicians following their digital revolution. (At least they could do live concerts to put bread in the cupboard).] I know that is not an intrinsic blame that can be laid at the door of ebooks but it is a default or 'cultural' outcome of them. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Sorry to be shrill in linking to this guy, but his topmost post today (1/30/12), I think, some here might find helpful... (inspiring even?...) http://www.jamesaltucher.com/ | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
There's a difference though, isn't there, Craig - between e-publishing/self-publishing in fiction and non-fiction? This Altucher guy is definitely talking about non-fiction - the kind of "here's how I made loads of money doing sod all" type of book (there's quite a market for e-books of that nature at the moment). But self-publishing in fiction, well isn't that more generally frowned upon? I know of several people who will say "it's a self-published novel, that means (s)he couldn't get a proper publisher, therefore it's rubbish". Personally, I disagree with that view - I've seen some absolutely amazing self-published fiction (and some rubbish too, but there *is* some really good stuff out there). | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
It's partially the term, I'm sure, "self-published," which has negative connotations. Like "tax increases" - they call it now, "revenue enhancements" here in the States. If it's good enough for the government, why not for authors? Give it another phrase or description: "I decided to put it out in an e-book format to get a broader range of readers." If that fails, then do the other thing governments are quite good at doing: LIE. "Oh, yeah, I had three big houses practically knocking down my door to get this published; but their deals looked shady, and they wanted me to wait too long to get it to market. I decided to turn down the easy money, and take a long shot risk, to get my work out to more readers. I mean, hey, it's not about the money with me, it's all about the readers...." Well, that last part can't be a lie, or few authors anymore (aspiring or not) would go the traditional publishing route. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
http://blog.authorsguild.org/2012/01/31/publishings-ecosystem-on-the-brink-the-b ackstory/ | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
One of the comments to the above article made a good point, I feel: "ebooks are services, printed books are goods. A major difference that hasn't been yet understood or sorted out." | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
It seems suitable to use an ebook format for ghost stories. Surely, there must be some synergy between the ghosts in books and the books as ghosts? | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
That looks to be a great article Des, I will take the time to read it.... I'm sensing something else, brewing - it's tangential to ebooks, but maybe not - and this may be just my paranoia going. And, one more and, this is just a sense, a whiff of something... like that first breeze on a sunny day, in a horror movie, that presages a coming storm.... But, I'm sensing the entire internet - what they used to call the "world wide web" - I'm sensing something coming, where the entire internet's fractured, down to the smallest of parts. No more monolithic corporations, no more megaliths of authority, no more dominant multi-million dollar companies: the Youtubes, Facebooks, etc., I see them all fading, as everywhere, individuals rise up and basically create their own space: their own place, their own domains, their own worlds. The fracturing will increase, it won't just be the movie/music industry, it won't just stop at the publishing industry... everything is going to break down to smaller and smaller units... I see it starting, in some places I visit on the net... or perhaps I'm being hysterical is all.... But... maybe not...? At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet...." -- Nietzsche, "The Madman" | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.177.115.204 |
"Des is in an ebook; nyer, nyer ne-nyer nyer"! http://www.amazon.co.uk/Idiopathic-Condition-Red-ebook/dp/tags-on-product/B00560 PIMO | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
And here, too, Mick! (contracted before my views were fully formed on the moving issue of the ebook) :0 http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/nemonymous-night-2/ | ||
| Di (Di) Username: Di Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 109.158.89.214 |
"It seems suitable to use an ebook format for ghost stories. Surely, there must be some synergy between the ghosts in books and the books as ghosts?" Ebooks on loan from our local library are apparitions - they vanish from my screen after three weeks. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.177.115.204 |
I found that too, Di. I "borrowed" a book last year - didn't get around to reading it and it vanished after three weeks. It's magic, I tells ya! | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/30/self-e-publishing-bubble-ewan-morris on | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
A good article making good points, Des. Again, I'm reminded of myspace, which was like an accelerated example of the bubble; and especially in the arena of rock bands, where band pages would have hundreds of "adds" - from other bands: all cooks, no eaters. I think like all bubbles, there's an element of real, un-seen-before value in it; like "homes for all Americans," a noble idea, the e-readers provide access to books long OOP, or completely inaccessible to but the very few, both cheaply and instantly. The money angle, that may not materialize, for most, but that's a different issue. We are increasingly entering a world where monetizing things is eluding us. Perhaps GOP candidate for President Newt Gingrich, some day in the future, will be hailed as far-seeing indeed for proposing a colony on the Moon - like the world of "Star Trek," a post-money utopia, he understood that we are going to have to start funding our very aspirational dreams, for society to continue as we know it (like the Medievals understood, with their own spaceship building programs called: your local cathedral). | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
the e-readers provide access to books long OOP, or completely inaccessible to but the very few, both cheaply and instantly. -------------- That is the one very appetising thing about ebooking, as long as we can get over the hurdle that reading electronic text is not the same psychological experience as reading it in the centuries-old tradition of a physical book (nor is it what the author had in mind when first writing it). I am sure I can jump that hurdle one day. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
At least that opportunity is there.... In my meanderings and linkings from that article, look at this thing I stumbled across: it's elsewhere titled "The Unspeakable Machine," and indeed, it has something of horror to its richly-metaphoric simplicity.... http://www.kugelbahn.ch/sesam_e.htm | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.158.58.16 |
Wonderful images, Craig. Thanks. EM Forster invented the internet in his story THE MACHINE STOPS early last century, too. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 49.225.206.120 |
New developments.. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/amazon-pulls-thousands-of-e-books-in-di spute/ | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Not something that's down to ebooks, except in so far as Amazon have done so much to create a huge market for them among their customers, and thus losing access to that market is a big deal. Something similar happened between Barnes & Noble and DC Comics recently - B&N were unhappy about DC selling digital exclusives via Kindle Fire and took all their graphic novels off the shelves. I imagine that hurt B&N more than DC... Waterstone's had (presumably still have) a similar policy - they ordered a book from us, then when paying said that although they might order further books from us, we should only supply them if we were willing to accept their ludicrously deep discounts. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Hmmmm. It seems PayPal is now dictating to indie ebook publishers just what kind of sex they can and can't include in their books. First they censor erotica - is horror next, I wonder? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/paypal-strong-arms-indie-ebook-publishers-o ver-erotic-content/1097 | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
My sympathies are with PayPal, on the whole. They aren't dictating what publishers can include in their books - they're just saying that you can't use their services to sell incest porn. I doubt that represents a huge change in their policies... | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
It's not just incest though, Stephen. One of the bits I read says that if the book's about shapeshifters, and it includes sex with a shapeshifter in a non-human form, then that's banned too! Seems a bit draconian to me. See the list of books that would have been banned under their new rules - including classics like "Lolita". No, my point is, once they start to dictate what can and can't be included in a book like this, where does it stop? Will they be censoring horror next? That's my point. I simply don't think it's a good thing to have an organisation like this dictate what can and can't go into a book. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Isn't the stuff about the shapeshifters from the guy who runs Smashwords, rather than PayPal? And he didn't say sex with shapeshifters is banned. What he said is more along the lines of, don't try to get around these rules by adding a line to the beginning of your bestiality porn to say that the dog the girl is having sex with is actually a shapeshifter. And again, PayPal are not dictating what can and can't be in a book. It's not censorship if you can still publish it. You just can't use their services to sell it. They don't want to be in the incest porn business. The only stuff affected is "erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest". Would Lolita fall under these rules? Or The Cement Garden? Only if you consider them erotic fiction. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
This is the actual letter from Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/press/release/27 | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Dolores Claibourne has a paedophilic incest scene in it. "It" has a full on pre-teen gang-bang. They'd both be banned. What about the Howling with the werewolf sex scenes? The fact is, Paypal isn't there as a censor. they're there as a payment service. They have no right to tell people what they can and can't sell. As long as it's legal, they shouldn't have a problem with it. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
No they wouldn't - none of those would ever be classed as erotic books. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.142.26 |
So the gang bang scene in It is OK while it's in It but if it was in a book with more sex in, it shouldn't be allowed??? If it's words on paper (screen), there's nothing illegal about it. They shouldn't be acting as a censor. They're also banning scenes of consual s&M between adults... The real issue is the censorship, not a discussion on whether or not a book classes as erotic. There's one of Dan Simmon's books that has an incredibly erotic scene in it, till you remember that the protagonists are only 13. It might not be an erotic book, but that scene was written in a deliberately erotic way. As long as it's not photographic or video I fail to see why they should start acting like this. It doesn't affect me one way or the other. But once they start acting like this, telling publishers what they can and can't put in their books - where do they stop? They allow you to buy weaponry through their stores so you can go out and kill someone, but they won't allow a bit of werewolf porn - which would knock most of the True Blood style paranormal romance stories right off the lists? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.142.26 |
For store in that last paragraph, read service | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
"The real issue is the censorship ... But once they start acting like this, telling publishers what they can and can't put in their books - where do they stop?" Yes, that's just what I was trying to say, Weber. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
The scene in It isn't porn. The book as a whole isn't pornographic. It clearly wouldn't be affected by Smashwords decision. Nor would True Blood. You might as well say Sainsbury's are censors for selling romantic comedies but not hardcore porn. Companies can choose what they're involved in selling, and decide where they draw the line. Rape, incest and bestiality porn seems like a pretty good place to draw it. I don't remember too many people coming forward to defend Amazon for selling the Philip Greaves book... | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.59.249 |
Ooooh, sex is such a bad thing, isn't it?  | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
That's not really what it's about, Hubert - there are still almost fifteen thousand books of erotica on Smashwords. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
I think either I'm misunderstanding this, or you are, Stephen (it might be me, mind you, but Weber seems to being seeing it the same way as I am too). The piece I read (admittedly it was late last night) was saying that if an independently published ebook contains any scene of, let's say sex with a shapeshifter while they're in non-human form (leaving aside incest, rape, etc, etc), then PayPal won't allow them to use their system for payment. That sounds to me like PayPal is trying their hand at censorship. And my question is - where will it end? Will they try to censor horror next? Scenes of violence? etc. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
By the way, who are Smashwords and what have they got to do with it? I thought it was PayPal. That was who was mentioned in the article I read anyway. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Ah, I can see who Smashwords are now. They're one of the publishers (? - or are they better called "distributors"?) who have been affected by PayPal's decision. So it's PayPal's decision to censor what can and cannot be included in an ebook I'm concerned about. Here's the article again: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/paypal-strong-arms-indie-ebook-publishers-o ver-erotic-content/1097 So I say again, if PayPal can dictate in this way what can/cannot be included in a book, isn't this censorship? And what are they going to try to censor next? Those of you publishing horror ebooks might find that PayPal have said your buyers can't use their payment services if they start to censor horror too. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
"have said" in the last sentence should read "say" | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
No, Caroline, Smashwords are a bookseller, like Amazon. They use PayPal to take payments. PayPal have said they won't let them use their service for taking payments for incest, bestiality and rape porn, and so Smashwords have decided to remove such material from their shop. Smashwords could have continued to sell it if they wanted - just not using PayPal. It's worth reading the actual letter from Smashwords that I linked to, rather than just the slightly hysterical second-hand reporting of it! Amazon had a similar cull of such material a while back: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/12/amazons-latest-kindle-deletion-erotic- incest-themed-fiction.ars. I doubt many of you think Amazon were wrong to stop selling the Phillip Greaves book... (See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11731928.) | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
It's worth pointing out that this isn't a new thing from PayPal - their rules for sellers already prohibit the sale of all sexually orientated digital goods: "Digital Goods – PayPal prohibits all account holders from buying or selling sexually oriented digital goods, including downloadable pictures or videos, subscriptions to websites, or other content delivered through a digital medium." You wouldn't normally expect something like that to apply to books, but clearly PayPal feel that Smashwords have been taking the piss. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.142.26 |
To go with the sainsburys analogy, it's not like calling sainsbury's censors because they don't sell porn, it's the equivalent of sainsburys being the 90% retailer of a publisher's range saying to a magazine publisher, "If any of your magazines have porn in, we won't sell anything you publish at all regardless of content". Without paypal, sites like Smashwords cannot survive and paypal know this. So they are acting in a censor's role here. And I'm sure that paypal are the payment type of choice on most dating websites. In fact I know they are for at least one. (Yes I subscribed to a dating website briefly - so sue me. Plenty of nuddy pictures of the other people on the site if you paid for membership and - it was definitely a paypal payment - and quite recently too) | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
These blog posts were interesting, making it clear it's something PayPal have been telling a lot of their sellers, rather than just a couple of the big ones, and it sounds like it's all happened very suddenly: http://selenakitt.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/19/slippery-slope-erotica-censorshi p/ http://selenakitt.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/24/slippery-slope-part-2-why-frogs- boil/ So the specific thing PayPal wrote to her was: "After a recent review of your account activity, it has been determined that you are in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy… In order to comply with our Acceptable Use Policy and avoid the limitation of your account, you will need to: - Remove those items from http://www.excessica.com that violate PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. Example/s: all ebooks containing themes of rape and incest. Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered obscene." Interesting to see that Amazon Payments closed her account too, for pretty much the same reasons. Something's obviously happened at PayPal to make them take a firmer line on enforcing their policy. Could be just a new person came in and noticed that a lot of stuff was being sold that broke their guidelines, or maybe they were getting complaints, or maybe a government fired a shot across their bows. Sometimes clampdowns happen just because someone else asks how come *they're* getting away with this. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Here's an example of the kind of thing PayPal are complaining about, one that's survived the Smashwords cull so far: http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/107018/1/daddy-likes-to-watch-barely-le gal-sisters-in-heat-book-1 It's silly more than anything, and I do agree with what Alan Moore says in Lost Girls (probably wouldn't be able to buy that using PayPal now...) about it all being fiction. It would be concerning if the government was trying to ban it. But at the same time, if PayPal don't want to be involved in selling it, that's up to them. If I had a bookshop, I wouldn't want to sell it. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.142.26 |
But they're not just saying "We won't sell that". They're saying "If you stock that we won't pay for anything your business offers". Those are two completely different statements. The second one is basically telling companies what they can and can't publish. Because these companies need paypal. If they were saying we won't pay for items x,y and z but you can still use us for the rest of your stock, that's fine. That's not what they're doing though. They're acting as censors and telling the companies what thay can and can't publish - and they're powerful enough that the companies have to accede to their wishes. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.142.26 |
If you had a bookshop would you impose a blanket ban on a publisher, or would you sell the stuff they printed that you were interested in and not bother with the rest? | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
"If they were saying we won't pay for items x,y and z but you can still use us for the rest of your stock, that's fine." We pretty much agree on the principle, then. And that is what PayPal are saying. They wouldn't care if you have a separate part of your store where you take payments by cheque. They're not just saying "take these out of your store", but rather "take these out of your store and you will no longer be breaching our terms and conditions". And they're pretty much the same content guidelines you'll find on Kindle DTP, Amazon Payments, Lulu, Google Checkout, etc. People have been ignoring those rules, but titles like "Daddy Licks My Pussy" (mentioned in one of the blogs above) have just pushed it too far. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
But I might be wrong - if PayPal are saying to people, "We won't do any business at all with people who sell rape porn, even if it's not through us", just point me to where I can read about it. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.51.62 |
From what I can make of this, I'm with Stephen. I didn't see anything about a 'blanket ban' on publishers of that kind of fiction, just the specific titles that go too far, in Paypal's view. Maybe I missed something, my brain is like jelly these days. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 81.153.249.1 |
Aren't Caroline and Weber simply pointing out that this is a sign of some thin end of a wedge that had not been noticed before. Just to ask one perhaps dumb question: is it now possible for someone to do a quick electronic scan of all the ebooks they're selling or distributing etc. and then effectively cause to be banned those with certain words or phrases or themes (erotic, horror etc.)? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Then why are they telling smashwords "take down this content or we close your account"? Smashwords clearly feel that they've been pressured into this. They clearly are not telling these companies that they can sell this stuff on another - unsupported - part of their sites, they're telling them to "TAKE IT DOWN or we close your account". | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
And Des - yes to that | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
What they're telling Smashwords is, we're going to close your account because you're in breach of our terms; take down this type of content and you will no longer be in breach of our terms. I imagine they would do something similar if they found you were using PayPal to sell shuriken or hand grenades. There are other ways Smashwords could change what they are doing to avoid breaching the terms of their agreements with PayPal, but they can't be arsed, so they're whipping up a storm around PayPal in hopes of getting PayPal to back down. Say "PayPal are censoring content" and people get angry. If they were a bit more honest and said "PayPal are refusing to help us sell Daddy Licks My Pussy or Daddy Likes To Watch: Barely Legal Sisters in Heat" most people's reaction would be, no shit, Sherlock, what did you expect? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Actually you can buy shuriken using paypal. I can't link to the site from work but I know when I was looking for a pair of Tonfa for my Ju Jitsu, the website I looked at had paypal backing and you could buy just about any martial arts weapon you can think of. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Woah! I think Stephen might back down now, Weber - now you've mentioned you're in to Ju Jitsu. Seriously, have I misunderstood the original article I linked to then? If I have, my apologies. I confess I haven't looked this up anywhere else - I haven't time. But it did look to me like PayPal were dictating what could and couldn't go in an ebook (if indie publishers wanted to use their payment services). So, what I was trying to get at was the censorship issue - ie. should a large company like this dictate what could/couldn't go in a book when, frankly, it's none of their business? But If I've misunderstood this, and this isn't what they're doing, fair enough. Of course I'm not in favour of the kind of porn Stephen's talking about - but surely good erotica's a different thing? It's like the distinction between "good" horror and pure gore/violence for the sake of it, with no literary merit whatsoever. Anyway, I'm out of this argument now. Sorry if I've misled unintentionally (still not sure that I have though ...) | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.59.249 |
The reasons why I'm not into e-books just keep piling up. "Ebooks on loan from our local library are apparitions - they vanish from my screen after three weeks." "Is it now possible for someone to do a quick electronic scan of all the ebooks they're selling and then effectively cause to be banned those with certain words or phrases or themes?" | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
"Is it now possible for someone to do a quick electronic scan of all the ebooks they're selling and then effectively cause to be banned those with certain words or phrases or themes?" That was just a question from Des though, Hubert - not a statement of fact. In answer to the question ... well, I can't answer it as I don't know. I guess technically it would be possible? But I don't know that anyone is actually doing it. I do believe that ebooks "bought" from Amazon, etc, are really just on loan from them though. They could delete them from your reader any time they wanted. Whereas all the paper books I buy are mine to keep (and treasured forever, in my case! ) | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Amazon has been known to ban books and then delete them from the kindles of people who'd already bought and paid for them... Regardless of the content, the fact that they can do that is scary and another reason not to bother with e-readers. They're currently deciding from their corporate towers that discussing dodgy sex in books is wrong and banning those, forcing sites to take down perfectly legal (if morally dubious) material - which they have no problem with if it appears in books in other genres. So far. What happens if they decide that the scene where Caffrey pretty much rapes his girlfriend in Birdman is "Rape as titilation" and decide to ban that? What happens when they decide to clamp down on violence in books as well as sex? All our favourite horror novels could suddenly vanish overnight. This is the thin end of a wedge we've all seen before. Except that now, instead of some mad old woman in the west midlands setting herself up as moral guardian to the rest of the country, we've got one of the most powerful corporations in the world acting as moral guardian and strong-arming indie publishers into taking content off their sites. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.18.174.156 |
The old "we're not against books, we're just against the wrong kind of books" argument for censorship... I'm with you, Weber. One can foresee a time when original hardcopy texts have been criminalised and all that we are allowed to read are carefully vetted transient electronic texts. They'll even claim it's to save the trees. It's the inevitable nightmare scenario that the loss of freedom of expression the moral majority/PC brigade would consign us to - if we let them. Ray Bradbury hit the nail on the head with this issue. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
"Actually you can buy shuriken using paypal." I bet you can, and up to a week ago you could also buy porn about a dad raping his children using PayPal... Both are against PayPal's terms and conditions, along with a long list of other stuff. When PayPal eventually realise there's a problem I guess they clamp down on it. "ie. should a large company like this dictate what could/couldn't go in a book when, frankly, it's none of their business?" Except that what we're talking about is very literally *their business*. Their business is taking payments, and they don't want to process payments for rape porn... Who would? "They're ... forcing sites to take down perfectly legal (if morally dubious) material -" That's an interesting point... I'm not an expert on the Obscene Publications Act, but I reckon some of this stuff would be likely to fall foul of it. It would certainly be on the borderline of what's legal here. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.142.26 |
well at least some of it that they're clamping down on is regarding consensual BDSM between adults - not even pictures but written down fiction about it. I don't see how that's even borderline... | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
It seems, Stephen, that you believe all they're clamping down on is true porn, whereas me and Weber (and Stevie? and Des?) see them clamping down on much more than that. As I said above, yes, if it's porn we're talking about then of course they have every right to clamp down on it and should certainly do so. But if they are merely doing a "Mary Whitehouse" and saying "No, you can't write about this type of sex even if it's perfectly legal between consenting adults" then that, to me, is censorship by a big corporation gone way too far. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Weber, that was suggested by one person put on the spot on the phone who probably didn't even know what he or she was being asked about... I didn't see anything in the Smashwords letter to say that that kind of erotica would be affected. For example it says plainly that PayPal's "hot buttons are bestiality, rape-for-titillation, incest and underage erotica". Elsewhere it says clearly "If you don’t write in these categories, you can disregard this message". | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
So is that article I originally linked to completely untrue then, Stephen? As I said above, if it is then I've been misleading people, which I'm sorry about. That's the only thing about it I've read/had time to read. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Caroline, in my post above I've quoted exactly what Smashwords have said PayPal have told them to remove. The blog you've read is just that person's take on that news, and it puts a particular gloss on it. If PayPal are demanding that BDSM be removed, then why are there still about two thousand books in that category on Smashwords? Maybe I'm dense, but I really don't see how you think sex between an adult and a child, or an adult and an animal, or rape, can be considered sex between two consenting adults? Incest, well okay, that could involve consenting adults. But that's the sum total of what PayPal are refusing to work with, and it sounds like you would support them in that. | ||
| Chris_morris (Chris_morris) Username: Chris_morris Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 12.165.240.116 |
Seems to me that it's inaccurate to say that PayPal is banning "sex between an adult and child, or an adult and an animal" etc. More accurately, PayPal is refusing to facilitate the spread of text materials that they deem obscene. That is, PayPal's restrictions do not concern real adults, children, or animals; they concern only words and ideas -- mere abstractions in ink (or e-ink). PayPal is unwilling to take money on the transactions involving these products, and is so appalled by the nature of the products themselves that they'll punish distributors by withholding their association even with that company's more "legitimate" transactions. This is entirely within PayPal's legal right as a corporation, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Obscenity is hard to define in any era, but right now, as a BDSM erotica novel decried on national television as "hardcore" and "disturbing" is the #2 Kindle bestseller at Amazon and as a poll from last November showed that 56% of all Americans believe the no book should ever be banned, you could easily make the argument that PayPal is very out of touch. Who at PayPal gets to decide what is "obscene" and what isn't? Will they determine that something with genuine literary value is obscene? What's to stop them? As I said, PayPal has a right to do this, of course, but Weber and Caroline also have a right to be concerned that this power will one day go too far. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
OK I'll quote from the article to try to explain (I hope Ramsey doesn't mind the direct quotes here - but it seems to be the only way I can explain to Stephen what I'm getting at): "PayPal told the booksellers they may not sell works of fiction that include sexual fantasies containing themes and implied scenarios of: pseudo-incest (including “daddy” fantasies, step-family), incest, fantasies about non-consensual sex or rape, bestiality (widened to include non-human fantasy creatures), and BDSM." Now BDSM is, to my knowledge, perfectly legal between two consenting adults, is it not? Add to that the bit that says "widened to include non-human fantasy creatures". That's the bit that suggests that, for example, the werewolf sex scene in The Howling would be out of bounds under these new rules. I think that's taking the whole censorship thing too far. And this is what the article said Smashwords told its authors about that: "Under the new PayPal policy, Mark Corker of Smashwords told all the Smashwords authors they would also have to remove paranormal romance that included shape-shifters - if the shape-shifters were to have sex in their non-human forms." That seems to confirm what I've said above? Plus: "Anyone that has done any kind of business online related to erotic content knows that PayPal will not do business with porn websites (or merchants that run websites that PayPal deems to be pornographic). Many early sex bloggers who did not consider their blogs to be porn - merely artistic erotic imagery - found this out that hard way when PayPal changed its policies to exclude doing business with porn sites back in 2003 (when it was bought by eBay). But the new development in PayPal’s moral standards bears serious examination." So, PayPal clearly already had in place policies to deal with porn - and I'm certainly in agreement with that - but this seems to be a NEW policy which goes much further and is trying to prevent indie authors (who want to use PayPal as their payment system) from including what I would consider to be perfectly acceptable storylines relating to sex. Indeed, I'd say that, in certain contexts, scenes of rape, incest and all kinds of illegal sexual acts are actually perfectly acceptable in written form (and, believe me, I'm actually an old prude!). So *that's* the kind of corporate censorship I'm concerned about here. However, if you're saying that article is totally inaccurate, then that's a different matter. Right, I'm going for an early night .. off to a Doctor Who convention tomorrow if I'm healthy enough. Much more fun! | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Thanks, Chris. My post after yours was in response to Stephen's of course - I just took a long time to type it! | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Caroline, you're taking the spin which that blog puts on events as absolute truth. As I've explained above, if you go to the primary sources for that blog post and read them for yourself you can see that none of the things you are worried about are actually happening (which is not to say one should not worry at all about the possibility that they might one day) and what is in fact actually happening is something you completely agree with. But then, I suppose panicking is what this thread is for.....! | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.142.26 |
"PayPal told the booksellers they may not sell works of fiction that include sexual fantasies containing themes and implied scenarios of: pseudo-incest (including “daddy” fantasies, step-family), incest, fantasies about non-consensual sex or rape, bestiality (widened to include non-human fantasy creatures), and BDSM." However, they still let booksellers sell the books you find in "Please daddy no" section you'll find in every large supermarket - you know the shelves set aside for true life accounts of how the author lived through his/her abuse at their parents hands (and other parts of the anatomy). These books have always looked to me like paedophile incest porn very thinly disguised. The material they're banning - if incorpated into books not sold as erotica is apparently fine to sell. "Rape as titillation" - surely 90% of Richard Laymon's books would fall under that banner. The problem with saying you can't sell obscene material is who decides what's obscene? For example - I read a book a couple of years ago called Embrace. It's by Mark Behr, a well renowned South african writer judging by the four pages of glowing reviews at the front of the book. It's about the sexual awakening of a young boy growing up in SA. It includes the single most graphic (5 page long) description of anal sex that I've ever read. When you consider that the book is told in the first person by a boy who's not quite 15 at the end of the book and the anal sex is with his choirmaster two years before the closing events of the book... Also included in the book are boy on girl sex, several accounts of boy on boy masturbation, numerous descriptions of genitals of all ages and a fairly graphic boy on sheep sex scene. But because this is a serious literary novel it's apparently not classed as obscene. (Personally I didn't think it was but it easily falls into all the categories listed by paypal) Surely if paypal are clamping down on this type of material, they should be threatening Barnes and Noble and waterstone to stop selling these books, not to mention Amazon. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.59.249 |
PayPal's restrictions do not concern real adults, children, or animals; they concern only words and ideas -- mere abstractions in ink (or e-ink) Real-life testimonies, photographs, paintings, drawings, depictions in any language - it all boils down to the same thing as far as John Law is concerned, at least in my country, and I don't think it's all that different in England or America. Better hide those Balthus paintings while there's still time! | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.30.23 |
"PayPal told the booksellers they may not sell works of fiction that include sexual fantasies containing themes and implied scenarios of: pseudo-incest (including “daddy” fantasies, step-family), incest, fantasies about non-consensual sex or rape, bestiality (widened to include non-human fantasy creatures), and BDSM." So the poetry of Yeats (including 'Leda and the Swan'), the works of Angela Carter (including an erotic version of 'Beauty and the Beast') the sadomasochistic writings of Jean Genet and the entire literary spectrum of fetishism and sadomasochism is off limits? How dare they even ban erotica for being non-vanilla? This is an ugly and sickening orthodoxy masquerading as protection of the innocent. The only possible response is: fuck Paypal... in every way it considers the world too nice to read about. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Agreed, Joel. BUT if Stephen is right (and I'm sure he will be) and that article is a misrepresentation of the facts, then that's a different matter and I've misled you all by quoting that article. I don't know - I don't have time to investigate this any further. But, however far PayPal are going with this, I guess the point is they ARE attempting censorship in some form - but maybe it's not as extreme as I though. I hope not. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.59.249 |
but maybe it's not as extreme as I though. I hope not. You're way too extreme, Carolinec! | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
You're right, Hubert! And I even missed the "t" off "thought" too. D'oh! | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 27.252.104.56 |
It was a very slippery slope but over now.... http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/paypal-revised-policies-to-allow-legal-fiction / | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Yay, now Smashwords can go back to being the douchebags they want to be...! I'm glad PayPal have butted out, though. I was reminded of this yesterday when searching Amazon for mother's day presents and it brought up the delightful Your Mummy Is A Fuckrag. Amazon have deleted it now, in their disgustingly censorious way. Fingers crossed it'll still be on Smashwords, eh? | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Stephen, don't you think that maybe you're confusing porn with erotica? These are obviously two separate issues entirely. No-one's arguing with you on the need to deal with porn - it's attempts by PayPal to censor erotica that's the issue. And what are they going to try next? Horror? Perhaps it will be too violent for them (even "our" kind of horror)? That's what I was getting at earlier, as I'm sure you realise. Anyway, I hope you've bought your mum something really nice for Mother's Day! | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Stephen, don't you think that maybe you're confusing porn with erotica?... There's not a man on, above, or under the earth that has ever had any problem confusing these things, Caroline. Oh - er - you were talking about something else, though. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Stephen, if you went into a shop to buy a copy of, say, von Triers' Antichrist, and when you got to the counter the shop assistant told you you couldn't use your Visa card to pay for it because there's an erect willy on show in the film, would you think it was any of Visa's business what film you wanted to buy? Paypal isn't a shop, it's a large internet debit card. They shouldn't be vetting what the consumer wants to buy. That's the whole issue with this. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
To paraphrase the Smashwords press release: PayPal have agreed that selling rape and incest porn is LEGAL and so because rape and incest porn is LEGAL we are going to carry on selling it because it is LEGAL. Well, it was legal for Matalan to sell padded bras for children, and legal for WH Smith to put Playboy branded merchandise in their back to school sales, but they were still despicable for doing it. Smashwords have done very well out of it. They've had loads of publicity, positioned themselves as champions of free speech, and established their own little niche: now everyone knows where to go for their copies of Family Fuck on the Farm and Backdoor with Daddy. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
A selection of the tags for that last one (as applied by the author): erotica, anal, rough sex, blowjob, outdoor sex, hardcore, incest erotica, sex ebook, anal virgin, anal erotica, pseudo incest, forced bj, anal rape, pseudoincest erotica, stepdaughter and stepdad sex, dad and daughter sex Yes, a wonderful victory for free speech. Weber, I agree that we don't want PayPal deciding what gets sold in bookshops. But if Smashwords don't clean up their act, the government will get involved, and then there really will be a serious risk to horror and other genres. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
Do Family Fuck own the farm, or do they just go there for recreation? | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
They work there. Things get a little crazy after one of the family brings home a possessed rabbit. "It was back to work for him as he picked up the rake. Then he heard something far off. It sounded like running and screaming. It didn’t surprise him too much. More than likely it was what he thought it was. Sure enough, it was. It was his stepsister, Brittany, and she was running towards the house with something in her hands. That’s when he stopped working, and headed towards her. Usually he would just ignore her silliness, since he had to be working, but today, there was something strange in her hands. Something fluffy." Der der derrrr!!!! | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.155.217.224 |
At the end of the day, all this stuff is words on a page, and if they were in some 800 page behemoth of a serious literary novel would be hailed as courageous writing rather than smut. And you'd guarantee that two thirds of the readership would buy it for the dirty bits. Even though it's not my thing, I have to say that Smashwords are at least being honest in their sales and not pretending that these scenes are written with any great literary merit behind them. Like I said earlier in this thread, I have a book which contains a 5 page 1st person description of anal sex between a 13 y.o. choirboy and the choirmaster which is beyond doubt the most graphic description i've ever read of any type of sex. Also in this book the boy tells about sex with boys his own age, a girl slightly older than himself (in a flashback to when he was 11) and sex with a sheep. Plus lots of descriptions of non sexual nudity of all ages scattered through the narrative. But this is a serious book tackling serious issues so these bits aren't unnecessarily graphic or just plain unnecessary - apparently. The book is Embrace by Mark Behr in case you're interested and at least 100 pages of the 800 are devoted to his sexploits. It's still a very good book, despite the overly enthusiastic depictions of the sex - and the ending was one of the most disturbing things I've read for a very long time. That's disturbing in a psychological way as the damage that's been done to him and his psyche comes home to roost. So if we can allow these scenes in one branch of fiction, it's not really a viable option to say you can't allow them in another type of fiction, however personally distasteful you find it. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Stephen, you do read some very strange stuff!  | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.155.217.224 |
are you mixing people up here Caroline? | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Err ... I don't think so, Weber. Take a look at the post before your previous one, where Stephen outlines a story for us. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
I thought he was taking the mick in that post... | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
Yes, Caroline - definitely not a book I have any plans to purchase or read! It's from the free sample of the above-mentioned family-orientated title on Smashwords. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Returning to the idea of copyright infringement, lost revenue, piracy, etc., we have this on the on-the-other-hand side.... http://youtu.be/GZadCj8O1-0 | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.158.62.42 |
And the pissig contest is well and truly under way. Do you have the Nook, the Kindle, the Kinde fire or the even more fantastic kindle touch? As soon as one is established they have to upgrade it to get more money out of the poor saps who believe the gadget it all important. Soon they'll be so obsessed with how many extra functions are on the readers that they'll forget to put a screen on the damned thing to read off. And how long before the latest one doesn't support the files that the old one does and you have to buy a conversion package to read your old books on your new reader? And theres no point in holding on to your old reader because they'll stop releasing books on the format that yours uses. But there's people out there who fall for this crap every time. This sums yup the pissing contest nicely. Warning - it's from the Onion so there are a few naughty words in there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyVh1_vWYQ | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.34.133 |
Good grief. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
Good grief, indeed, Mick. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.143.187 |
Just before Christmas the Kindle Fire was the best thing ever!!! You were a fool if you didn't go out and buy one NOW!!! Only 3 months later the Kindle Touch is the best thing Ever!!! You're a fool if you don't go out and buy one NOW!!! I can't be arsed with it all. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 77.98.13.43 |
If only you couldn't. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.34.133 |
Just before Christmas the Kindle Fire was the best thing ever!!! You were a fool if you didn't go out and buy one NOW!!! Only 3 months later the Kindle Touch is the best thing Ever!!! You're a fool if you don't go out and buy one NOW!!! Sounds like you've been reading the Daily Mail again, Weber. Are Kindles marrying our women and taking our jobs too? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.143.187 |
No, they're eating our women and raping our food | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
I think Weber's talking sense. Eeek!! Shoot me, someone, before it's too late ... | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.34.133 |
BANG! | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.145.211.27 |
The modern obsession with gadgetery is capitalism's greatest ever wet dream. Gone are the days when people buy things to use them till they break. Now people buy expensive gizmos and willingly replace them within weeks because the manufacturers tell them that the new model is the one they should have instead. Whether or not the one they have is still perfectly good for the job in hand. I just find it sad. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.255.62 |
He said, typing on a PC. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.255.62 |
No, really, I do agree that buying 'bells and whistles' variations on perfectly serviceable gear is a fetish masquerading as necessity. Nothing's funnier than someone trying to rationally justify another impulsive purchase. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.145.209.145 |
Even worse- typed on a smart phone. Which i got free from virgin even though i'm on payg. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.34.133 |
"Willingly replace them in weeks"? Weeks? Really? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.143.187 |
Well it's only 12 weeks since Christmas when we were told that the Fire was the must have kindle. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.143.187 |
There are enough massively stupid people out there that they'll switch already. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I have to confess, that just this past Thursday, I went ou |