Amazon.com Widgets
zgf architects via seattle times
npr.org
Thriller author Barry Eisler, a born-again proponent of self-publishing (and the first established author to sign with Amazon’s publishing division), told a local audience that :
Needless to say, in many parts of the book establishment (the most tradition-bound establishment in all the lively arts), them’s fightin’ words.
•
Meanwhile, authors Sarah Weinman and Maureen Ogle have put up separate online essays. Each questions the future of “serious non-fiction” in the digital age.
Under the old regime, profitable publishing houses subsidized this work with large advances against royalties. In many cases, the publishers knew authors would never earn these advances back. It was the companies’ way of subsidizing prestigious “loss leader” works.
But if self-publishing becomes the new business-as-usual, Weinman and Ogle ask, what will become of long, research-heavy projects—projects that could take as many as five years of an author’s full-time attention?
There’s always Kickstarter.com. That’s where local comix legend Jim Woodring is raising funds so he can work full-time on his next graphic novel.
And there are always grants, fellowships, teaching gigs, and working spouses (for those authors who can land any of them).
And there’s another answer, one that’s right under Weinman and Ogle’s proverbial noses.
Both essayists note that the most successful e-book self-publishers, thus far, are fiction writers who churn out several titles per year.
Non-fiction writers can do likewise.
They can chop up and serialize their longer works, one section at a time.
When it comes time to put out the full book, authors can still revise and re-sequence everything.
In another sector of the digital media disruption, music-biz attorney Ken Hertz reminds you that even (or especially) with the new marketplace, bands still face tremendous odds against “making it.”
liem bahneman, via komo-tv
designboom.com
buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery
udhcmh.tumblr.com
to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.… Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.
to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…
Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.
irwin allen's 'the time tunnel' (1966), via scaryfilm.blogspot.com
…building businesses whose only way of making money will be through advertising. Are there as many different ways to slice things as all the startups, collectively, would have you believe? And when they’re done, what will happen to them?
Our ol’ acquaintance Timothy Egan has a nice piece about the book and reading scenes here in Seattle.
One statement is particularly important.
Egan notes that even while e-books have boomed, print book sales in the U.S. have remained steady or declined just a little.
This means the book biz has weathered the simultaneous trends of the Great Recession and the Internet convergence a helluva lot better than other media genres—theatrical movies, DVDs, radio, broadcast and cable TV, magazines, and especially newspapers and recorded music.
This totally contradicts the incessant whines of those “book people” who insist that they are a disappearing elite.
joybra.com, via seattlepi.com
j.r. simplot co./idaho dept. of environmental quality, via kplu
one of rob vasquez's many out-of-print 45s, via aarongilbreath.wordpress. com
(No snickering jokes from this corner about a certain three-digit number.)
goodreads.com
Amazon wants you to stay in their electronic ecosystem for buying ebooks (and music, and movies, and apps and games). So does Apple, Barnes & Noble and Google. None of them are interested in sharing you with anyone else, ever. Publishers, alternately, are interested in having as many online retailers as possible, each doing business with them on terms as advantageous to the publishers as possible.
anti-riaa ad from the electronic frontier foundation; via university of texas
Two reasons why Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney’s recent verbal sparring partner, should not be considered a spokesperson for the Obama campaign or for any “progressive” thing:
(1) She became a PR shill for BP, post-gulf-spill.
(2) and most important: She infamously headed the Recording Industry Association of America during the start of that outfit’s notorious “anti-piracy” extremism.
Rosen didn’t just shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy. She fostered the music-industry lobby group’s policy of punitive aggression in the name of the Almighty Intellectual Property.
After she left the RIAA, the staff she’d hired served all those ridiculous suits for ridiculous sums against lowly individual file-sharers—and against some individuals who’d never shared a file in their lives.
Elsewhere in randomland:
Some recent developments in the Apple/Amazon/big book publishers/Justice Dept. rumble: