Google ebooks

I was excited to learn recently that Google ebooks has now made buying through local bookstores much, much easier. For reasons previously discussed on this blog, I am no fan of Amazon. I was sad to learn last year that my favourite source for ebooks, The Book Depository, had been purchased by Amazon.

Never fear! Google ebooks has teamed up with independent bookstores to give you both range AND the ability to support your friendly neighbourhood indy bookstore. I found out about this through Laura Miller, who wrote about it here. The ebooks are sourced from Google ebooks, but you buy through your favourite bookstore's website and they get a cut.

The idea is still catching on in Australia, but at present you can already support Australian businesses by buying your Google ebooks through Booktopia or Dymocks.

Don't forget, if you're looking for places to get ebooks in general, Project Gutenberg is your best source for free ebooks of out-of-print books, and Inkmesh can help you find tricky-to-find ebooks.

Round and round and round she goes

Since I abandoned this blog last year, the Australian book market has undergone a dramatic change. At this moment, the entire market is in a state of flux and nobody really knows what's going to happen.

The collapse of REDgroup Retail led to the close of 139 Angus & Robertson and Borders stores, with many suburban areas left without a local bookshop. Crikey provides a rundown here. For people like me, who no longer live within reasonable distance from a bookstore, this means relying on online purchasing. But the online market has gone bizarro, too. Here's what's happened in online bookselling this year:

• Austalia's largest online bookstore, fishpond, has started outsourcing many purchases to warehouses overseas. While this means that a larger range of books is available, it also means that the customer has to wait much longer while the item is first shipped from the USA or the UK, and then shipped from fishpond's Sydney warehouse. This means it's just as cheap and much faster to order from overseas.

• Ferrier Hodgson, the administrator for REDgroup Retail, has sold the A&R and Borders online stores to Pearson Education. Pearson Education is a publisher, so this signals and unprecedented level of direct involvement in the book market by an Australian publisher.

• The Book Despository, the best option for buying books from overseas, has been bought by Amazon. This concerns me, because I think Amazon just might be the devil.

So where is one to buy a book? And what is going to happen to the book market? I suspect something big and different is going to happen over the next few years, but what it is I can't guess. Bookselling is a centuries old industry and things just haven't changed that fast until now.

In the meantime, these are the things I want to know:

• I want a local independent bookstore. Where's my local independent bookstore?
• Am I still going to get free shipping and my choice of non-Kindle ebooks on The Book Depository?

For those interested, by the way, I think I might start posting here again, though somewhat less regularly than I used to.

Some random thoughts

Why do most fiction authors fall into the first half of the alphabet? Or, to be precise, in A-M?

I've worked in books for eight years and as long as I can remember, three quarters of the fiction shelves in each workplace have been taken up by A-M, with N-Z squashed into the final quarter and dominated by Jodi Picoult and Wilbur Smith.

Is there some natural law which makes people with surnames beginning with A-M more talented? Do authors choose pseudonyms in the first half of the alphabet so that they will appear earlier in catalogues? Are there simply more surnames overall which begin with A-M? Or do book buyers scroll through lists of possible purchases starting at A and run out of money at N?

The biography section is evenly divided between A-L and M-Z. Every fiction section (general fiction, classics, speculative fiction) is skewed. I'd like to know why.


In other thoughts, now that I've decided to get myself a e-reader for study purposes I'm a bit frustrated to find that many of the text books I need are more expensive in e-book form than they are in paperback. It would be handy to carry all my text books around with me, but am I really willing to shell out an extra $20 per book?

I understand that the cost of producting e-books is nowhere near as low as most consumers estimate. Scott Westerfeld in his blog about Macmillan vs. Amazon explains:

"All discussions of this event will draw commenters who think they magically know how books should be priced, and who say there is no reason for electronic editions to be more than $9.99. A quick note to them: You don’t know what you’re talking about. Seriously, your back-of-the-envelope calculations are crap. The printing costs of a book are generally between 3% and 10% of list price. So in most cases, 10% should be your “first-printing” e-book discount, not 50%. That may seem weird to you, but that’s because all the cheap stuff on the internet is backlist (like Baen Books), subsidized/coerced (like Amazon), self-published (no editing or marketing costs), or promotional (like when I gave Uglies away for free). Yes, the “long tail” of backlist books may become very cheap, or free, but not the new stuff, which is what this discussion is all about."

But still. I don't want to pay more for an e-book. I'm a reluctant convert. I'm still getting used to the idea of having e-books.

Here's a bright idea: why don't publishers of text books offer hard-copy/e-book bundles? At, say, $10 more than the paperback price? Now that I'd be willing to pay for. I could highlight to my heart's content and carry around a light, easy reference tool.

One star reviews

I decided to try out a little experiment suggested by Jeanette Demain in this Salon article. The method: search your favourite books on Amazon, read the 'one star' reviews. See if you can't avoid coming away "profoundly disheartened and pessimistic about the continued existence of humankind."

Here's what I found:

The Princess Bride by William Goldman
"I went to amazon to find a unabriged copy of the princess bride. The copy I recieved is not unabriged. I found out that amazon dose not have aunabriged fore  sale,but if you request it it comes up that they do.So now I am stuck with a book that I do not want and still nedd the book that I do not have." [sic]
(If you haven't read The Princess Bride, it might help to understand that the book is not actually abridged. There are several authorial interruptions throughout the book, but these are part of the fiction.)

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (Book 1 of the Liveship Traders)
" This is 809 pages of adolescent drivel. The conflicts established provided ample opportunity for a satisfying resolution that never occurred. Far too much elaboration on the shallow reflections of flat characters. As a reader, I felt cheated."
(I want to scream: Flat? FLAT!? Hobb's characters come in so many shades of grey they put E Ink to shame. They're more complex than... than... ['What's something complex?' I ask, and my dad and brothers suggest several possibilities: integrals; rocket science; the female mind? Any of those works. Insert your own.] FLAT!!??)

Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery (Book 2 of the Emily series)
"Emily Climbs is a book for people of no imagination or life. Ittook me forever to read because of the lack of action and adventure.I don't reccomend this book to anyone with an imagination. END" [sic]

Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
" 'Stardust' was just about the worst book i have ever read. It's extremely boring, and some parts are very inappropriate for little kids.The first chapter was pointless and too long (30-something pages) and had bits of fluff that were not important. Every chapter is 20 pages or more. I stopped reading it by chapter 4." [sic]
(Perhaps this would be a suitable criticism of a children's book, but I fail to see how it applies here.)

Buying a better way

Something that matters a lot to me is finding a better way to buy. It's important to me to find fair trade or single origin (easily traced and therefore usually ethically sourced) coffee and chocolate. It's important for to me to buy clothes and jewelry that weren't made using sweat shops or other forms of exploitation.

The publishing industry is one in which large corporations make a lot of money and small, independent publishers struggle to make ends meet. It is a very old industry, currently in flux due to the rise of e-books and online giants such as Amazon. It is my belief Amazon has consistently put its own needs above those of readers and publishers, and furthermore has used its clout to bully publishers into submitting to this. For a brief list of controversies surrounding Amazon, see this.

Monopoly of an industry by a single online giant is good for nobody.

There is, however, a little-known Australian online retailer of books, fishpond. If future, if you want to buy books I've mentioned, I'll link you there.

Most of my readers are Australian, and so will benefit from free shipping for orders over $49, book prices listed in Australian dollars, and a guarantee that ordering from fishpond will cost Australian customers less than ordering from Amazon.

Furthermore, my conscience will be clear because I'll know that I've linked you to a site that respects the needs of publishers, authors and readers.

Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon

For those of you who haven't already heard about this:

Publisher Macmillan and global online bookstore Amazon were engaged in battle this week. The long-short of it is that Macmillan demanded higher profit margins and higher prices for the e-books sold through Amazon and Amazon responded by ceasing all sales of Macmillans' books (both e-books and hard copies).

The story can be found here. The end of the story had Amazon acceding defeat, but not without resentment: "we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles." (Fancy that, a publisher having 'monopoly' over its own titles!)

Anwyay, the most amusing thing in the whole debacle was this advertisement in the New York Times, which read: "available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon":

I note that at the time of writing, the book in question is still not available through Amazon.

Edit: For the interested, Salon's Laura Miller provides an in-depth discussion here.

A Further Edit: Author Scott Westerfield posted his opinion on the topic at his blog here, with such eloquence and humour that I now think I absolutely must get hold of one of his books.