One aspect of the dispute between Amazon and Macmillan that has not generated as much ink as the initial skirmish is the impact that ebook pricing, whether it’s $10 or $15, will be on small independent booksellers of the bricks-and-mortars variety.

I mean it’s good that authors will get compensated appropriately, and that publishers are allowed to recoup their investments, but what is the impact on traditional booksellers, and where do publishers think that they fall in all of this brouhaha?

On one hand, the publishers can be seen as sticking up for bookstores, demanding comparable pricing for ebooks as for old-fashioned paper and ink versions. However, this pricing only benefits the chains (and Amazon’s non-ebook products), who drastically discount books anyway (at pricepoints that rival the new ebook prices) and doesn’t do very much for independent booksellers and wholesalers, who pay for books based on the publishers’ list price and cannot run a business based on loss leaders.

Bottom line, $15 ebooks prolong bricks-and-mortar booksellers’ suffering, it doesn’t end it.

Paul Oliver (a former bookstore co-owner) states an eloquent case about the lack of love sent to booksellers’ way at The Devil’s Accountant, and is well worth a read.

(Via MobyLives)

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As I type this, Apple is approaching the sale of their billionth iTune download, needing just 4,400,000 downloads. Currently, according to their countdown page, songs are being downloaded at the rate of about 60,000 songs per minute. This could be chalked up to the contest they are having, in which the lucky billionth download will win its buyer a $10,000 iTunes giftcard.

iTunes was first introduced in2001, so you can say that they’ve sold over a billion songs a year in its lifetime, and at $.99-$1.29 per song, that’s a lot of money changing hands.

Now, nobody expects digital books to sell as quickly and in a similar volume to individual songs, but ebooks have been around longer…so how long before book downloads hit even a tenth of such a staggering number?

(via Gizmodo)

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I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that when I visit somebody’s house for the first time, I make it a point to scan their bookshelves to see what sort of reading material this person is into, as I like to think that the books say something about the owner.

Or at least that’s what I used to think.

Conservative bloggers are having a field day because one of their own was taking a tour of the White House while he was killing time before the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and, while in the library, happened upon some books that to him revealed that the First Family’s radical Communist agenda.

Yes, nothing will brand you as a Commie quicker than a dusty copy of The American Socialist Movement 1897-1012.

Sad thing is that the library in question was in fact curated at the behest of the First Lady…in 1963.

So, while this whole episode turned out to be embarrassing for the blooger who saw the books as evidence of Communist sympathies, it reminds me not to be so quick with judgment the next time I scope somebody’s bookcase.

After all, what impression would somebody get looking at my bookcases? A shelf or two of books on the Third Reich (which I studied in college as a German major) might make me look like a Nazi. That copy of Jeff Noon’s cyberpunk novel Nymphomation? I must be a deranged sex addict. That copy of the biography of Trotsky that Harvard University Press recently released? I must be in league with the Obamas!

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Did anybody catch that episode of 30 Rock a few weeks ago, where James Franco has to pretend to have an affair with one of the main characters because he is actually in a relationship with his Japanese moe body pillow (basically a body pillow with a picture of an anime character silkscreened onto it)? It’s really funny, and you can catch it here.

Well, I guess somebody thought that, given the market for those kind of things (I guess that goes beyond the desperate and dateless of the otaku set), something like this would make sense.

However, I find it really creepy and wrong on so many levels.

Yes, it’s a body (well, upper torso and arms, anyway) pillow of Edward from Twilight. Although I have to say that it looks as much as Edward did in the movies as I do.

(via Topless Robot)

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“It was hard to draw God… I used a lot of white-out, a lot of corrections when I tried to draw God”.

R. Crumb speaking with David Colton at USA Today about, what else, how to draw God in his Book of Genesis.

(via The Comics Journal)

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The film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Girl With The Dragoon Tattoo, which has been successful in its release abroad, will open on American soil March 19th (in New York, at least).

The website for the film currently has lots of release information for when the film played in the UK and Australia late last year, but zip on American release dates. It will open in Portland, Oregon on April 16th at the awesome indie theater Cinema 21, but who knows where and when the film will play in other cities.

If I were the releasing company, I would work with the book’s US publisher and with booksellers to drum up some ticket sales. Sure, it’s a subtitled film, but I can bet that a lot of the book’s readers, many of whom probably wouldn’t otherwise see a subtitled movie, would be interested in checking it out. If the releasing company only targets the art house theater crowd, it’ll sink without a trace…at least until the American remake premieres.

I’ve already seen the movie (I won’t say how), and I really enjoyed it. I appreciate that the film didn’t attempt to glam out any of the roles, and didn’t attempt to dilute some of the more disturbing aspects of the book.

I’ve embedded the trailer below. I hope they do a better job of subtitling the film then they did of this (She’s definately our best researcher!?!).

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I’m not one to celebrate Valentine’s Day. My wife and I have an understanding, mutually arrived at, where we don’t give each other anything. It’s not that we’re not romantic, we just refuse to be tools for the Valentine-Industrial Complex.

Northwest author Chuck Palahniuk seems to be having a field day with the holiday, as he has been sending buyers at high-profile indie booksellers a Valentine treat of a chocolates, rubber snakes and galleys of his upcoming novel Tell-All (due May 4th from Doubleday).

Daniel Golden, owner of Boswell Book Company, blogged about his holiday booty, and Arsen Kashkashian, buyer at Bolder Bookstore, recently tweeted about getting his box.

I’ve gotta hand it to Chuck, he’s always had a knack for this kind of self-promotion. When showing up for events, he would often throw out rubber Halloween masks and other novelties to the audience. Heck, he had audiences passing out during a string of readings about five years ago. In fact, I still have the box that screams when you open it that he sent out to promote Haunted.

I don’t know how good Tell-All will be, but at least he’s getting a lot of folks talking about it. And somehow, I don’t feel dirty doing so myself.

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Yes and no.

Lifehacker recently ran a survey to see what folks are interested in paying for ebooks, and the results were hardly surprising.

The majority of respondents claimed that the price they would pay for ebooks would top out between five and ten dollars. Coming in dead last, behind folks who planned to never pay for ebooks, was the percentage of respondents who would pay between ten and fifteen dollars, which is what Macmillan and other publishers are shooting for with their new agency plan model for selling ebooks.

On the surface, this looks bad. It seems that Amazon’s strategy of setting ten bucks as the benchmark price for ebooks seems to be paying off,and indeed, if the comments on their Kindle Community are to be believed, fifteen dollar ebooks are the embodiment of corporate tyranny.

And is the five-dollar difference really going to be what drives a customer to either boycott a title, borrow it from the library, or just illegally download it? If these readers look at this move purely as a 50% price increase, and feel that the purchase of a $300 gadget entitles them to cheap reading material, then probably yes.

However, if it’s something they really want to read, and don’t want to wait for a cheaper version (ie. Mass Market), or aren’t clever (or dishonest) enough download it illegally, they’ll probably bite the bullet and pony up the extra fiver.

What I’d really like to see come of this is a re-evaluation of the price of hardcover books, or even the practice of windowing formats (hardcover>trade paperback>mass market). I’d like to think that maybe, just maybe, with this new pricing structure in place, more traditionally printed titles could hit the street at prices hovering around this majestic $15 mark.

After all, if publishers are going to bend (somewhat) to the will of readers of ebooks (which still represent a sliver of the entire industry), how will they react to the ire of traditional readers, who will soon find themselves in the position of subsidizing the less expensive ebook versions of the books they purchase?

What ever happened to making money from razor blades?

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So with all of the hullabaloo surrounding Focus on the Family’s Super Bowl anti-abortion commercial, it seems odd that its controversy thunder could possibly be stolen by another commercial, let alone a beer ad.

But, here is a Bud Lite ad that skewers women and their bookclubs that seems to have aroused the ire of the online community, most notably Edward Champion, who writes that in addition to being misogynist (isn’t most advertising?), it implies that “if you’re a man, you don’t even need to read to get ahead in the world”.

I agree that it’s surprising that folks can get worked into a froth over Janet Jackson’s nipple, but can tolerate such blatant sexually coded advertisements.

But I would also argue that what you see during the Super Bowl is pretty representative of what viewers see all year long, whether baseball, basketball or football is in season. Consider the demographic: these are guys that if they weren’t watching it at home, they would be freezing their tails off in their seats, shirtless with torsos painted with their team’s colors.  Madison Avenue isn’t appealing to the Mensa members who watch one sporting event a year, though you would think it with what they charge for an ad.

There’s a reason you don’t see ads for diet products, Rosetta Stone foreign language instruction or exercise equipment during the Super Bowl and it’s naive to think that anything uplifting will be presented when there are men to be sold beer, nacho chips and drugs to cure erectile dysfunction.

So to Ed and the others, I would say chill out. Complaining that television is sexist is like complaining that the rain makes things wet. While I don’t condone this ad, I tolerate it because I enjoy living in a country that has what is laid out in our First Amendment.

(via GalleyCat)

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Lots of friends have pointed this video out to me over the last few days, and since I’m tired of kvetching about Amazon and Macmillan, I’m posting it here.

Enjoy.

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