That’s Entertainment!
by wjw on July 14, 2014
I’ll be on the mountain for another six nights or so, doing my Taos Toolbox thing, so you might as well look somewhere else for entertainment. I’d like to suggest reading the new novel by my buddy Jimmy Corey, Cib0la Burn. The latest in Jimmy’s Expanse series, it’s a corking good extraplanetary adventure, and I think it’s damned good.
Of course it’s from Orbit, which is to say Hachette . . . so if you want an actual paper book printed between cardboard covers, you’ll have to buy it from someplace other than Amazon, which continues its stubborn effort to punish Hachette by destroying the careers of its writers.
Apropos the Hachette-Amazon negotiation, the latest is that Amazon offered to pay Hachette authors 100% of their ebook price, and would restore all the buy buttons on Hachette’s books, if Hachette would only agree.
Which comes to, “We will give up 30% of our income on your titles, because it costs us nothing, while you give up 70%, because that will cost you everything.”
So Hachette promptly turned down the offer, calling it a stunt (which it was), which caused all the Usual Suspects to go online to say “Hachette Is a Big Ol’ Meanie Who Wants to Crush Authors, while Amazon loooooves authors (especially meeeee) and This Proves It!”
I have a whole long angry essay I’d like to write about this, but it’ll have to wait until I’m down from the mountain.
In the meantime, the Hachette/Amazon negotiations continue, and nobody’s saying anything about that.
And elsewhere, the FTC is suing Amazon because its purchasing software allows children to rack up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards. The FTC went after Apple some months ago for the same thing, which caused Apple to point out that they changed their app some back, and also to point and say, “You should totally sue Google, because they’re doing it too!”
We are clearly in Big Boy territory, here.
So what I’m saying is, “Go buy books from Hachette authors. Especially me! Especially James S.A. Corey! Because we’re fucking awesome! “
=30=
Haha! I binged on this series last month for a space opera guilty pleasure.
Did you have anything to do with their wormhole gate with the nested encoded relief designs and pocket universe with the internal station speed limit?
Bought the hardcover from B&N when it was released. I thought it was probably the best of the series so far.
Comments on this entry are closed.