Some Thoughts on Books and Publishing

[thewayne]

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!

Comments

[cp.livejournal.com]

"[F]ar too many books," sir? I submit that there is no such thing! :) The obvious answer is: build your library and never move. I like the convenience of ebooks, particularly the ability to carry a virtual library on a single handheld device. But there's still nothing like a real book, in my book (see what I did there?).

I miss the glory days of the indoor shopping mall myself, particularly the book stores. The town I grew up in was fairly small, so entertainment was limited--but the mall was always a great destination when I was a kid, for the sheer variety. I could spend hours in the bookstore, and then pop over to the arcade until I ran out of quarters (which was usually pretty fast).

That Finishing School series does look interesting--you enjoyed, I presume?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

When I think about the packaging and shipping costs, and the fact that most of these books have not been touched in a decade or three, then yeah, too many books.

I was the opposite, moving from Phoenix to the boonies. We just lost our closest bookstore, not that it was anything to brag about. The entire Hastings chain went *POOF*, I'm hoping FYE will move in as they already have a foothold in northern NM and El Paso, so we're right in the middle between 'em.

The Finishing School was quite interesting, I think your girls would enjoy them. A young woman, Sophronia, is more than a bit of a tom girl. The book opens with her jimmying the dumbwaiter so she can spy on her mom's secret meeting with the representative of the finishing school to find out what's going on, resulting in an exploding trifle, transport to the school with a brief stop at Bunson's School for Evil Geniuses, an attack by flywaymen (and later Picklemen), training in etiquette by a vampire and hand-to-hand combat by a werewolf, climbing around the the outside of an airship, and other assorted fun. I intend to check out her other writing when I get back from DC next week. I believe the author is a geologist by profession, which I think is quite cool.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I mostly grew up in villages and small towns, so even having a book store was a complete novelty. =:) My introduction was through the "book clubs" some of my schools (we moved a lot) ran - every quarter or so, a slender brochure would arrive, we'd peer through the descriptions, and tick off the selections we wanted. That, mind, was back when a paperback would be on the order of 25-40p - true, there's inflation, but books really were dirt cheap then, so picking up, say, all of the Narnia tales, or anything from Roald Dahl, was no big matter, and my parents were happy to encourage my reading habit. ^_^

I'm very much a digital bunny, as you know. Partly out of environmental concerns, given the toll of producing paper, then shipping that around, then distributing the book, and also just out of convenience, given I've continued to move around a good deal, sometimes internationally - schlepping heavy boxes around is something I can do without, especially if that means having those titles buried in storage for years.

I tend, at least sometimes, to buy the book through Apple or Amazon, and then fetch a DRM-free copy off the net. Technically, it's still not kosher, but I'm fine with it morally - I've paid the author (or attempted to - FSM only knows how much or little the author actually received after the publisher's taken their cut), and I still get a copy I can use however I wish. Would that studios and publishers would eventually accept that lumbering their wares with DRM makes them less valuable - an iTunes Store TV episode or film is something I can play, but it's useless as far as the BD player in the main room is concerned. Likewise, I can't just send a copy of an iBooks edition over to the roomie; at least Kindle's architecture provides, AIUI, for "lending", as you note.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

In my experience, Barnes & Noble always had the worst science fiction and fantasy selections of any of the bookstores I've been in. Not bad, per se, but so very narrow that it could be mistaken for the selection from a grocery store. I'm including a few great local bookstores, including Tower (yes, Tower had a bookstore, and I lived near the flagship one), Tattered Cover, and of course, Powell's, as well as Borders, which actually bothered to be somewhat responsive to its clientele.

Heck, when your local used stores have a far wider selection of contemporary sci-fi than the B&N, you know they're not doing very well there.