Bloggasm

What’s a Culture Snob to Do?

In the same car is another, older woman … holding up a Kindle at an angle to catch the light. Unless you were an elf camped on her shoulder, what she was reading was hoarded from view, an anonymous block of pixels on a screen, making it impossible to identify its content and to surmise the state of her inner being, erotic proclivities, and intellectual caliber. She might be reading Alice Munro, patron saint of short-story writers, or some James Patterson sack of chicken feed—how dare she disguise her download from our prying eyes! And reading an e-book on an iPhone, that’s truly unsporting. It goes the other way as well. How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

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One thing can be said about science fiction author Cory Doctorow: When he releases a book for free, he goes all out. Not only does he release it under a Creative Commons license, but he presents it in as many downloadable formats as possible — everything from plain text to PDF — and even allows his fans to create non-commercial derivative works based on his books.

Given that Chris Anderson’s soon-to-be-released Free is all about this concept as a business model, one would think that he would go all out. But based on some preliminary evidence with the UK launch of the book, his publisher doesn’t seem to be going on a give-away extravaganza:

—UK publisher Random House, at the launch event last week and in an upcoming promo with BrandRepublic.com, is giving away free abridged paperback versions of the book.

Anderson says that’s “in association with Adobe” – the exact relationship there isn’t detailed but it’s basically subsidization of the sort we’ll assume is dissected in the book when it hits shelves Tuesday. Anderson does say: “This special sponsored paperback edition is the entire book minus, if memory serves, the appendixes.”

—And European streaming music service du jour Spotify is hosting the three-hour audio book, narrated by Anderson, to both its free and premium UK users, saying Anderson “has had a great influence on Spotify … The Long Tail, has been required reading in our office since day one”. The title may even be a new business line for the service as it looks to add enough value to its premium line-up that people will pay its £9.99-a-month ad-free subscription: “We’re going to trial it, see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us.”

So he’s giving away free paperbacks? I get those if I go to a book conference or convention. He’s streaming the audiobook on a single music service only available to UK subscribers? This may not be the only free promotions the publishers plan for the book, but if it is, then the book’s subtitle “The Future of a Radical Price” does not even describe the book’s own distribution. There is nothing “radical” about it.

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Author Apologizes for Twitter Outburst About a Bad Review

The novelist Alice Hoffman caused a stir over the weekend when she used Twitter to strike back at a mixed review of her latest novel, “The Story Sisters.”

Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

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The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell popularized the genre that Chris Anderson’s “Free” fits into, so by trashing it in this week’s New Yorker, is Gladwell effectively killing his own offspring?

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

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Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism

Occupying the bulk of pages 41–42, Anderson here explains the origin of the phrase “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” writing about the nineteenth- century phenomenon of saloons offering free lunches with the purchase of alcohol. The great majority of this text exists phrase for phrase on the Wikipedia entry “Free Lunch,” including a block quote and several quotes from contemporary newspaper accounts.

Much of the text in question—though not all of it—was originally written by Wikipedia contributor Dpbsmith (Dan Smith) between November 19 and November 26, 2006.

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The publisher has launched an online book store that aims to sell competitors’ products and its site has championed authors published by other imprints

Pablo Defendini, the web producer for Tor.com, said that above all else he is “publisher agnostic.” Tor Books launched its new site — part social network, part blog, part online magazine — last year and saw an immediate explosion of traffic after hundreds of fan blogs linked to it. Tor is arguably the largest science fiction and fantasy publisher in the US, but with this new launch it was evident that it wanted to be something more, a kind of hub for the entire fan community. It published new professional short fiction and comics every month and invited a number of well known bloggers to write for the site.

But though many predicted that the site would be a “loss leader” for Tor titles, the site has heavily promoted the work of authors from other publishers, inviting them to blog or contribute fiction. So when it was announced recently that Tor would be launching its own online book store, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that not only Tor titles would be carried.

“We’ve had great participation from other houses in terms of editors from other imprints blogging on our site and talking about their own books and other books, and it’s been very positive,” Defendini told me in a phone interview. “And we realized that we should probably put up a book store because people were really asking for it and we really wanted to bring that same welcoming attitude to the store. and so that’s in effect what we’ve done.”

He said that Tor approached just about every science fiction publisher imaginable — big and small — to include them, and since announcing the launch he has been approached by several others.

Tor will be able to leverage the community of its site that it launched last year to promote books from the store, but Defendini was hesitant to consider the site a “loss leader.” He said that he doesn’t think of the site as primarily a promotional tool for Tor titles.

But still, one can’t help but note that playing host to a fan community should have enormous benefits for the host. There has been some evidence that some Tor titles saw increases in sales after the publisher released them as free ebooks, and Defendini said there have been anecdotal incidents when it was obvious that the site had turned on fans to new authors.

Tor is working with Ingram to distribute the books that it sells through its store. Though Tor isn’t offering ebook versions of the books yet, it plans to do so soon.

“We’re dead-set on getting this as right as we possibly can: we want to sell you ebooks that are a pleasure to read, are useful and hassle-free to manage, and we want to sell them to you in a way that is as simple and as unencumbered by technology as we can possibly make it,” Defendini wrote in a blog post. “As an ebook reader, these are headaches I’m all too familiar with, and I have no desire to enable them further. So it’s taking us a bit longer than the print store, but I’m happy to announce that we’ll soon also make ebooks available for sale, and in keeping with the spirit of Tor.com, the ebook store will carry titles from all SF/F publishers as well.”

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I’ve always been skeptical as to how much money Amazon Affiliate advertising brings in for all but the biggest players. Instapundit, which has several hundred thousand readers a day, links regularly to Amazon books and reportedly drives a lot of sales that way (he’s helped books’ sales ranks skyrocket), and I don’t doubt that he probably generates a nice side income, but anecdotal evidence I’ve seen shows that Amazon Affiliate marketing brings in even less income than Google Adsense for most blogs.

Either way, North Carolina is thinking about taking a crack at taxing those click-through sales, which has left Amazon threatening to remove affiliate ads for those who live there:

This week Amazon.com, Inc. wrote its North Carolina affiliates to explain that if a suggested “click-through” tax passes, the bookselling giant could end the affiliate program in the state–cutting out website owners who earn money by featuring Amazon books on their site.

According to the News Record, the state legislature proposed $784 million in new taxes to meet a budget shortfall, including a “click-through” tax on Internet sales that could earn the state $13.2 million in a single year. If that tax change passes, then the online retailer could end the affiliate program in North Carolina.