Some booky gubbins from over the weekend … a sad bit of news that caught my eye on the SFBC blog is that Perseus Book Group is axing a few subsidiary houses in their acquisition of Avalon, one of which is Thunder’s Mouth Press.

In my fortunate position of getting sent more books than I have time to realistically read, it’s a rare occasion that I lash out my own cash on one, but two of the books I bought in the last year were Thunder’s Mouth titles: Sterling’s Visionary in Residence collection and Rucker’s Mad Professor. There’s a lot of these amalgamations happening in publishing at the moment, and I wonder how this will pan out over time - the Long Tail hasn’t yet kicked into the book market the way it has music.

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Some bibliophile at The Guardian got given a demo unit of iRex’s forthcoming Iliad ebook reader to try out for a month, and seems to be fairly impressed by it – although he reckons it’ll be a long time before they kill of the print book business, which is something I’ve always conceded and which has been stated by minds far greater (and more versed in the technology and economic ramifications) than mine. But as reflects the item above, the following statement is interesting:

“It won’t destroy bookshops, any more than the much more advanced music-download business has destroyed albums.”

I can only assume the gentleman hasn’t seen the sales figures for the music industry recently – the album is indeed dying as a format, as is the bricks-and-mortar music outlet. The effects will take longer in an industry like literature, where pace of change is by necessity that much slower (books take time to write and edit after all), but if there is a truism in media these days, it is that “technology disrupts markets – inevitably and irreperably”.

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Finally, we have the one and only Bill Gates proclaiming that reading will eventually go entirely online. There’s no timeframe mentioned, of course, and it’s probably a tautology to all but the most agressively technophobic. But Gates has scored well as a futurist prediction machine in the past – his book The Road Ahead, published in 1995, was stunningly accurate as far as such documents go – though not without some prophecies that look remarkably silly in hindsight.

We’ve got a long future of paper books to come – with POD technology making short runs more practical and affordable, there’s little reason that science fiction should suffer the effects of change any more than the greater market as a whole. But as the Guardian fellow says, we will start to see ebook readers in the hands of the ubergeeks – Stross’s “Slashdot Generation” - very soon, and the first increments of change will begin to unfold.

If I had £500 spare, I’d happily be one of those technology pioneers – indeed, should anyone from Sony or iRex be reading, I’d be more than willing to evaluate and critique their product for them over a lengthy time period …

SF Signal have been running a poll on the ‘do people buy books after reading the free electronic version’ question, and they’ve posted the results up.

Have you ever purchased a book that you first sampled as a free eBook?

No. Why should I pay for it when it’s free?
11.7%
   (12 votes)

No, because I did not like (or finish) the book
2.9%
   (3 votes)

Yes. I prefer to own the books I read and/or I prefer real books over reading on a screen.
41.7%
   (43 votes)

I don’t read eBooks.
43.7%
   (45 votes)

(103 total votes)

While it’s a valuable set of results, I can’t help but feel the methodology was a little flawed. I don’t know much about sociology and the designing of questionnaires, but I think the questions should have been separated out:

• First asking “do you/have you read ebooks”, then
• asking those who answered ‘yes’ whether they’ve ever paid for an ebook,
• whether they bought a physical copy of the specific book they read for free, and
• whether they bought other works by the same author on the strength of the free material, or from a sense of wanting to pay for something that they didn’t necessarily have to.

Then follow that up with the question about the totemic or practical value of the book as media platform.

Obviously, these results aren’t entirely transferable beyond the arena they’ve been gathered in – specifically genre fans, and more specifically blog-reading genre fans – but it’s still interesting to note that less than half of the respondants have never read an ebook, and only a little over a quarter of those that have read them decided not to pay for it, for whatever reason.

Pricing is going to be an issue with the ebook format, and it’s possibly the one thing holding development back. And I’m not talking about ebook reader hardware (although Charlie Stross made some great points about the problems with that), but the pricing of the actual files themselves – Tobias Buckell has some thoughts on that, and he brings the perspective of a young author at the start of his career arc, enabling him to say what might be unpalatable or less obvious to an older professional:

“Other than Baen’s rational approaches, no ebook program has made sense to me, and as an author, looking over the money made by ebooks by Baen authors, my opinion is that the inability of publishers to price ebooks properly and utilize them is probably costing me money that could be being made.”

That’s the argument of someone who loves their craft, but who also treats it as a modern business. We’ll be hearing more like this, sooner rather than later.

Well, what do you know – Locus Online has been running for a decade. They must have been one of the first sf publications to dip a toe in the digital waters. I wonder if they’ll be among the first to take the plunge and abandon print entirely?

Hey, you! Ever read a free ebook that you downloaded with the author and publisher’s blessing? Did you go and and buy something by the same writer afterwards or not? Go and give up the ten seconds it will take to tick a box in Galleycat’s poll to determine whether giving it away is an effective loss leader tactic or not. I’ll be very interested to see the results from this.

At the Telegraph, a list of the top 100 books published since 1982, according to a survey of Waterstones staff.

A few undeniable genre works have made it in:

• Neuromancer (Gibson, William)
• Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood, Margaret)
• Watchmen (Moore, Alan) [a graphic novel, forsooth!]
• Northern Lights (Pullman, Philip)
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Clarke, Susannah)

And a few “oh no, I don’t write science fiction” jobs:

• Girlfriend In A Coma (Coupland, Douglas)
• Time Traveler’s Wife, The (Niffenegger, Audrey)
• Cloud Atlas (Mitchell, David)

Plus two of Iain Banks’ non-sf works (Crow road and Wasp Factory natch). I’ll bet our Banksie is pleased as punch to be on the same list as Sophie Kinsella …

Look what I found in my inbox as soon as I got home – an email from Hub Magazine:

“The format Hub is changing. As we have not been able to employ a full-time advertising salesperson we have not had the ability to attract a sufficient amount of revenue to keep the magazine going in its existing format. Even though we almost sell out each issue, sales revenue is never enough to cover costs. You may be aware that the cover price of a magazine (for a magazine of our size, at least) is usually a loss-leader. The aim is to attract advertising, and though the subscribers were with us we simply did not have the business acumen sufficient to sell the quantities of advertising needed. Hub was put together by a couple of people with an interest in genre fiction – not by an experienced publishing empire.

Hub will therefore move to an electronic-only format from issue 3.”

I’m kinda chuffed; it adds weight to my earlier assertions about electronic publication as a better potential business model. I’m kinda gutted, because that’s one less dead-tree mag I’ll be receiving (and I do like them, you know).

Furthermore, it’s distracted me from dwelling overlong on the fact that I just got dumped by text-message on the last leg of my journey home. Happy Easter!

Well, this sure looks interesting. The Caravan Project is an experiment into offering non-fiction titles in a whole range of formats, including electronic:

“Just as consumers of music, film and television now can choose how to receive those media, the Caravan Project will offer buyers of serious non-fiction books a “menu” of formats, both print and digital, from which to choose how they read a book.

“Caravan, funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, will use all the emerging digital and time-tested technologies for the manufacture of books with a goal of making their distribution in the marketplace significantly more efficient by placing them when and where they are needed.”

Of course, this is ‘serious non-fiction’ they’re talking about. You know, the sort of thing that has a small dedicated readership, and has miniscule print runs in comparison to the latest blockbuster best-sellers. Which reminds me somewhat of a genre I’m rather fond of …

King Canute got wet feet. The tide is coming in. I know that suggesting electronic formats as a future for genre fiction isn’t popular with a lot of people, but I’m damned if I’ll admit defeat yet.

I’d read two books by Karl Schroeder in the last few months, both of which blew me away. So I took it upon myself to send the man an email to see if he could spare some time to answer some interview questions from me. He very graciously agreed, and I am therefore very pleased to present the first Velcro City author interview. Continue reading “Author Interview: Karl Schroeder”

Depending on where you sit, the word “literary” preceding the words “science fiction” is either a handy descriptor denoting a certain flavour of genre writing, or a pretentious label that denotes tedious over-egging of the writerly pudding.

It’s probably fairly plain that I’m a fan of literary sf, but what the hell does that actually denote, anyway? Where is the line drawn? And is it inherently ‘better’ than other forms? Continue reading “A vindication of ‘beer-money’ science fiction”

Cory Doctorow’s latest column for Locus Online discusses the topical hot potato of copyright, in the context of a world where the electronic distribution of entertainment media is becoming increasingly commonplace; his previous piece had a similar remit. The thing that astonished me most about these two columns was this: the utter lack of public reaction to them from the online sf community.

Continue reading “Has science fiction gone future-blind?”