Month: January 2009

Bad book buying?

Is buying books online immoral?

This seems a little ridiculous to me. It’s true that as used book sales rise, sales of new (and more expensive) copies are likely to decline. But if I go online and buy a used copy of a book, that’s not cheating the author. I’m not in an immoral quandary. If I decided not to buy the book at all, would anyone claim that I was taking money out of the author or publisher’s pocket? If I read my library’s copy instead of buying my own? How is this argument any less specious?

Unless I’m missing something, online book resellers bought the book from the publisher — if not directly, then at least from whomever first bought it. Even if the book is a castoff or all but free at a yard sale, at some point, money did exchange hands. No matter how low the re-sale price is now, and no matter that the author and publisher are cut out from a share of the re-sell profits, the book was bought and paid for. The author will receive whatever percentage of the original sale the publisher’s contract allows.

If some of the books sold online are review or gratis copies, and that’s taking a significant bite out of the earnings on a book, then the publishers should limit the number of free books they send out. They should try to limit the number to people who will actually review or endorse the book, and hold on to their copies rather than turn around and re-sell them.

The right of resale has existed for a very long time, even before the internet came along to make the process quicker and easier. I buy the argument that the internet has changed bookselling and publishing, often drastically cutting into profits. Small brick and mortar bookshops have been hard hit, and book sales overall have declined. As someone who works in publishing, I have a vested interest in getting people to buy more new books. But buying used books is not the problem. It may very well be a symptom of a larger problem — why are more people buying used books instead of new? — but it’s the larger problem that ought to be fixed.

Tuesday various

  • Alfred Shaheen, inventor of the Hawaiian shirt, has passed away. I know at least one person who will be inconsolable for days. [via]
  • So it’s official: Sci Fi Wire has become another io9. Although, as Glen points out, there are probably better things to be.
  • An online planetarium. It’s a neat, if at first somewhat dizzying, application. [via]
  • I don’t often (that is, ever) post Metallica videos here. But that’s only because I’ve never seen any as seriously entertaining and weird as this one. From Tunguska Event to zombie disaster, it’s worth watching even if the music isn’t your cup of tea. [via]
  • It’s The End of the Financial World as We Know It:

    Say what you will about our government’s approach to the financial crisis, you cannot accuse it of wasting its energy being consistent or trying to win over the masses. In the past year there have been at least seven different bailouts, and six different strategies. And none of them seem to have pleased anyone except a handful of financiers.

    Substantial and sweeping reform is going to be needed to get us out of this mess. [via]

One on writing, one on reading

Theordora Goss:

The story should never stop, not in a ballet, not in an opera, not in a story. When the story stops (in a ballet, an opera, whatever), all that’s left are technical exercises.

Christopher Barzak:

The more you consistently read in such great quantities, though, the harder it is to be caught in a story’s spell. You learn the tricks and see the hands moving…this is also one of the signs of a story that gets its spell off and holds its reader: you never see what’s coming, the trick retains its secrecy and mystery, it remains magical despite your best explanations.

Monday various

  • This is mostly for my own future reference, but should also be of interest to anyone else with an ebook reader in the audience. (I’m really loving mine by the way.) One Dollar Orbit. Orbit Books is offering an ebook a month for just $1. I’m not too interested in this month’s selected title, but I do think I’ll pick up Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons in February. Maybe it will encourage me to finally finish Consider Phlebas.

  • Also mostly for my own benefit, xkcd’s Guide to Converting to Metric. We’re making very slow progress on this in the United States, and I find it very difficult to think in terms of degrees Celsius or kilometers instead of miles. When we were in England this past November, a co-worker and I were walking around Brighton when someone on the street asked us for directions. We had just passed the building they were looking for, so my co-worker said, “It’s about maybe half a mile back that way.” To which this clearly more-local-than-us gentleman replied, “Half a mile?!” Like we’d told him it was 23 and a third radishes away or something equally nonsensical. We probably should have stuck with guessing the number of city blocks.

  • Alberto Gonzales: casualty of the Iraq war. Won’t anybody think of the real victims? [via]

  • Speaking of real victims, though: There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. This is a very disturbing idea. [via]

  • But rather than end on a downer like that, may I present — Cute Things Falling Asleep. It’s like a very specialized Cute Overload. [via]

A little companionship

Now that the new Doctor has been chosen — and I’m cautiously optimistic about that choice, by the way — speculation on who will be his new companion has already begun. Most, if not all, of this speculation will prove to be wrong — did anyone suggest Matt Smith before his name was announced on Saturday? Did anyone even know who he was? — but that’s no reason for me not to make my own wild and totally inaccurate guesses, just like I did last week. It’s not yet known whether David Tennant will be joined by a companion (or two, or twelve) in his last few outings as the Doctor, but I’m not going to concern myself with that right now. These, instead, are my predictions for the companion that will join Mr. Smith on his adventures in the TARDIS. They are:

  1. David Tennant. A former Doctor as companion. It’s as madcap as it is unprecedented, but there are ways they could make it work. I mean, there is that half-human Doctor who ran off with Rose in the fourth season finale, “Journey’s End” — although maybe the less seen of him the better, hmm? Still, it would be a nice way of weaning fans off of Tennant and on to the new guy.

  2. Russell T. Davies. Either as another character or, in a bizarre postmodern twist, as himself. Either option would work equally well — which is to say not at all — but either way, it would finally let Davies himself moon over the Doctor in unrequited love, which has clearly been a dream of his since he was but a boy. Unrequited, I should say, until that fateful winter night when, on the run from the Cybermen and having drunk just a little too much mulled wine, the two of them… Well, I’ll just let you slash writers in the audience figure out the rest of that.

  3. Julia Sawalha. Maybe best known as Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous — at least on this side of the pond — she was Rowan Atkinson’s companion, Emma, in Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. Which, as it just so happens, was written by a certain Steven Moffat. Full circle perhaps?

  4. A Dalek. Named Skippy. Again, think of the irony! British children love their irony!

  5. Any of the Doctor’s former companions. Or maybe all of them, through the magic of CGI and careful digital editing. Most of them are probably still alive if any new dialogue needs to be recorded. Elisabeth Sladen already has her own spinoff and working relationship with the BBC — and she looks phenomenal for a woman of 60, I might add! And if not her…well, there were several decades of companions to choose from! I ask only this: please, no Adric.

  6. The ones who got away. Any of the characters who were almost, but never quite companions — or for whom a life mucking about in space and time just wasn’t in the cards. Your Sally Sparrows, your Adam Mitchells, your Astrid Peths, your Madames de Pompadour…any of a dozen different returning favorites, given a second go-around. Hey, it happened with Donna Noble.
  7. Professor River Song. I’m actually not kidding about this one. As portrayed by Alex Kingston in the fourth season two-parter “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead,” the character’s most interesting feature is that she will, at some point in the Doctor’s future, get to know him extremely well. And in his audio commentary to “Silence,” Steven Moffat suggests he’s quite interested in revisiting the character at some point. Would she be his next companion, Matt Smith’s first? Too much is still unknown about what kind of Doctor he’ll be, where exactly Davies’ four movies will leave the series off, and what Steven Moffat has going on inside that head of his. But at this point, she’s just as likely as Lily Allen, don’t you think? Not that I don’t like Lily Allen…

Incidentally, it’s been pointed out that Matt Smith, the new Doctor, appeared in The Ruby in the Smoke and an episode of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, both starring Billie Piper. That’s not really relevant to this discussion, but it is an interesting little factoid.