Tag: books

…On my first book tour I was invited to Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago. The employees optimistically set up seven folding chairs, then occupied those chairs themselves when nobody showed up for the reading.

Armed with such experiences, my writer pals and I took personally Amazon’s assault on the kinds of stores that hand-sold our books before anybody knew who we were, back before Amazon or the Internet itself existed. As Anita put it, losing independent bookstores would be “akin to editing … a critical part of our culture out of American life.

(via Amazon’s Jungle Logic - NYTimes.com)

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/opinion/amazons-jungle-logic.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all)

Tim Bray · On Books

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/09/26/On-Books

This is one of the reasons I’ve bought only two books for my iPad.

I’d be totally happy to buy an e-book for more or less what the author gets paid, plus a markup of maybe 100% to cover the costs of marketing and editing, as long as I can share it at a family-and-friends scale. It’d be a no-brainer.

But given the current arrangements, I’m being charged just a little bit less than I pay for paper and getting a whole lot less, and it just doesn’t feel like a good deal. Of course, a setup like I’m proposing would leave the publishing industry as we know it in ruins. Which wouldn’t bother me in the slightest as long as the authors and editors can still get paid.