Some Thoughts on Books and Publishing

Like many who blog, and many science fiction/fantasy readers, I’m a voracious reader and have been for pretty much all my life. I remember going grocery shopping with my mom back in the ‘70s to a place called Fed Mart and occasionally getting a book for $0.25 or 50 cents. I specifically remember getting a copy of Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape with this campy vampire photo cover. Later, as a teen, I’d ride the bus to the mall, which had both a Waldenbooks and a B. Dalton. And science fiction and fantasy each had their own area in the store.

It was around that time that I had the realization that books were coming out faster than I could read them.

Later on, Walden became Borders which were squashed by Amazon, B. Dalton and other stores adopted their parent company name of Barnes & Noble and mostly moved out of malls to mall pads and much larger stores. I’m actually very sad that most malls no longer have book stores.

ANYWAY....

My wife and I were at a Barnes & Noble at the mall in Las Cruces last week. As usual, I cruised the new SF releases. There were a couple of things of mild interest, but nothing of sufficient interest for me to buy. I decided to review my Looking For Books list on my phone, and as expected, I didn’t find anything.

Which lead me to another realization: not only do books come out faster than any one can read them, but now there are so many books and authors, that if your tastes deviate too far from the mainstream, the odds of you being able to find specific authors stocked in stores diminish greatly!

Personally, I’d prefer buying a book in a store rather than ordering it from Amazon. The money supports local jobs and helps the local tax base. Yes, it costs more, but usually just a couple bucks. But I’m finding that more and more, my authors just aren’t stocked. Sure, I can count on the latest by David Weber or Jim Butcher or Cory Doctorow or John Scalzi or Charles Stross, and Terry Pratchett was always either in SF/F or YA.

But Alex Bledsoe? Wen Spencer? Lynsey Addario? Jasper Ford? Josh Vogt? John Lampshead? NVBL (not very bloody likely)

Now, this is a two-way problem. I’m learning of some of these authors through free short story ebook collections that I’m downloading from Baen and such. The authors in these collections are already established, and they’ve now added me as a wider market. And I’ve decided that the fact that I can’t find them in book stores doesn’t matter a bit because of the way that I found them in the first place – ebooks.

I have far too many books, as does my wife. And eventually we’re going to have to move, perhaps internationally. And I absolutely do not want to move all those books! So I’ve decided, with very few exceptions, that pretty much all new book acquisitions for me are going to be ebooks. For example, this month I’ve read all four volumes of Gail Carriger’s YA steampunk series, The Finishing School. The first one was made available from one of my discount ebook newsletters and I bought the rest from Apple’s bookstore. But I think I’m going to try to buy more directly from publishers as I’d prefer to have direct epubs so that I have a file that I can back up. While I don’t think Apple will ever go away, you never know what is going to happen with DRM. And if I like a book and want to share it, I can give it to my wife for her to read. That’s perhaps the only thing that I like about the Kindle platform: the ability to lend books.

Anyway, enough of a rant. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and a trip to DC to prepare for.

G’night! Or g’day! Whatever your current geographic solar situation pertains!