Movie Log: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The boys and I watched the latest -- and longest -- Harry Potter movie yet, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, last weekend. And I can't muster enough energy or enthusiasm about it to say much more than that; it's a big flashy movie that has less verve or directorial presence than the last couple of movies in the series, and follows (as best I remember) selected high points of the novel as closely as it can.

The end feels rushed and muddled, as if the movie itself realized that it only has twenty minutes left and has too much left to get in. And I'm afraid Michael Gambon both overacts horribly and fails to convince as his Dumbledore drinks the nasty potion of lingering pain (or whatever it's really called). On the positive side of the acting ledger, Helena Bonham Carter has a ball chewing the scenery as an EEEEEvil (with five capital "E"s) Death Eater, and brings the audience along in her enthusiasm.

(I was also going to credit Imelda Staunton with her great, giggly, nastily motherly performance, but then I realized she was in the previous movie. They do begin to run together at this point, though the fans don't seem to care.)

Anyway, it's a well-made piece of popular entertainment, with state-of-the-art special effects, and it provides work to nearly the entire British filmmaking profession. Those are all good things, I guess.
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Listening to: The Mountain Goats - Lovecraft In Brooklyn
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 3 (2/6) -- Cake Wrecks by Jen Yates

Cake Wrecks is, for the three of you who didn't realize this already, the latest manifestation of the blog-into-book phenomenon, leaping forth from the blog of the same name. Some people in the publishing biz have complained about books like these -- because they're done quickly, often are reusing already existing content, and are usually quite frivolous -- but I have no problem with them; I've been a fan of the quickie Zeitgeist-y humor book since long before I was in the business myself, back in the days when I was buying things like The Official Preppy Handbook and Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. (I never claimed to have perfect tastes in books, and who would want that, anyway?)

So I don't feel superior to Cake Wrecks in any way; it's a blog I enjoy a lot -- Jen Yates is a great blog-writer, with a wicked sense of humor and timing, and she's developed an immense network of readers and followers, which, in that great bloggy way, has given her ever more content -- and I was happy to see it jump to book form, and just as happy to see it succeed. (I just quickly looked it up on that famous book-industry sales-tracking system, to be sure it has succeeded, and it has.)

In fact, this is one of the very rare books that my entire family loved -- I grabbed it from the library a few weeks ago, and we were all looking through it over dinner afterward, laughing at the cakes with "Nothing" and "I want sprinkles" and "Congratulations as small as possible" and "I didn't like you that much anyway" written in frosting on them. The whole Hornswoggler clan -- yours truly, The Wife, Thing 1, and Thing 2 -- all laughed out loud at this book, with Thing 2 particularly enjoying it. A book that can do that is a big success. Cake Wrecks is a silly, frivolous, gift-y humor book, an impulse buy, and will never be seen as a contribution to deathless literature, true. But it's also genuinely funny, and one of the best ways to spend a couple of hours with your clothes on.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: The Deathray Davies - I Put Opium In The Food
via FoxyTunes

Book-A-Day 2010 # 2 (2/5) -- You'll Never Know by C. Tyler

The full title of this oversized graphic album is You'll Never Know: A Graphic Memoir, Book One: A Good and Decent Man, and I think you can see why I used the short version for my post title.

Carol Tyler might be the Howard Waldrop of the comics field: a highly respected, deeply skilled creator with a slim body of work and a tendency to disappear (at least from the new-release shelves) for years at a time. You'll Never Know is only Tyler's third book -- after The Job Thing in the early '90s and the collection Early Bloomer from a few years ago -- in a career that's lasted nearly twenty-five years. But she's a cartoonist's cartoonist, a favorite of heavyweights like R. Crumb and winner of the first Dori Seda Memorial Award -- hence my Waldrop comparison.

Tyler's panels are generally loose and airy; she often gives the impression of only drawing the important elements (particularly in close domestic scenes, rendered in almost-monochrome earth tones), so bodies trail off into nothing and backgrounds sometimes disappear. But, only a page or three later, those backgrounds open up into larger, more fully rendered panels with deeper colors. It takes guts to shift style as strongly as that, and experience to make it work well; Tyler has both.

This is the first book of a projected trilogy about Tyler's father's WWII service; it covers his induction and life stateside from '41-'44, along with his first few months overseas in North Africa. (The next volume, presumably, will bring the elder Tyler to Italy, where he saw things he wouldn't talk about even fifty years later.) Framing Chuck Tyler's story -- and note carefully that his name also shortens to the "C. Tyler" that the cartoonist has signed her work as for many years -- is Carol's contemporary story, dealing with a feckless ex-husband (who can't quite decide how ex he's going to be) and with raising her own daughter.

American comics have a few models for family stories -- Maus is the most obvious one, with its followers like Perseopolis and Fun Home -- but they've always been more about going away, getting out and seeing the rest of the world. Tyler has the good luck to have it both ways with this story -- it's both how she finally learned truths about her father and what happened to him when he went out into the wider and more dangerous world.

I like Tyler's art somewhat better than her writing; her prose is serviceable, but rarely much better than that, while her art is smooth and supple, with an endearing multitude of lines. But You'll Never Know is interesting both simply as a work of oral history and as a more complicated re-imagining of nonfiction material; it's definitely one of the stronger graphic novels of last year.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Basia Bulat - I Was a Daughter
via FoxyTunes

Metrics of Quality

I don't want to be snarky here -- well, maybe just a little -- but I'm coming to wonder: does the fact that someone blogs for the Huffington Post prove she is not very good at her chosen career, or just imply it?

(The female personal pronoun was chosen out of deference to the HuffPo's host, but should be taken to cover men as well.)

The Bookseller's Diagram Group Prize for Odd Titles Announces a "Very Longlist"

With social media like Twitter driving ever more submissions, Horace Bent of the UK's Bookseller magazine has announced that this year, for the first time ever, the annual Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year is starting off with a Very Longlist of 49 titles. Those 49 were culled from the ninety submissions received by Bent, many of which were sadly too old (such as 1907's The Sacrosanct Foreskin of Christ in the Cult and Theology of the Papish Church of Berlin) or self-published (like The Historic Adventures of the Purple Waffle Iron on His Horse Made of Asparagus).

But the final list -- which is available at the Bookseller's website in its entirety -- still features such gems as Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, Cute Yummy Time, The Great Dog Bottom Swap, Venus Does Adonis While Apollo Shags a Tree, and my current favorite, Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich.

A panel of distinguished judges, led by Bent, will whittle this long list down to a shortlist, to be announced on February 19th, and then the final choice will be thrown open to a public vote. The final winner will be announced on March 26th -- and I dearly hope it won't be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which has gotten enough publicity already.

Quote of the Week: The Logic of Jovian Moons

"Jupiter's moons are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist."
- Francesco Sizzi, professor of astronomy, presents the case against Galileo in 1610

Book-A-Day 2010 # 1 (2/4) -- Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

If you've been anywhere near a bookseller in the past couple of months, you've either already seen Superfreakonomics or you have an amazing ability to overlook the obvious. (If the latter, perhaps I should introduce you to my younger son, who, when recently asked to get something from under the sink, was monetarily confused and then said "You want me to pick up the sink?")

In any case: this has been a huge bestseller, and has contributed to HarperCollins's just-announced great second quarter nearly as much as That Palin Woman. It's also the "sequel" to the equally huge bestseller Freakonomics, as you might have guessed from the title.

I read the first book a few months before I started this blog, so I can't link to my thoughts on it -- they remain inchoate and locked in my skull. But Superfreak is pretty much the same thing as the first book, perhaps with slightly more "we're smart and special and rich and thus we have all the answers" attitude. (This may have been built up by their New York Times blog for the for the past few years; if there's anyone more arrogant than an economist, it's a Times writer.)

Economists can be interesting to read, but I imagine they're annoying as hell in real life, since they all have the usual monomaniac's refusal to see any other bases for behavior or explanations for events than their habitual Big Hammer. Superfreak has that glossy, quick-read bestseller style, designed carefully to give the reader the impression that he's learning things and getting smarter, while still depositing him at the end of the book smoothly, efficiently, and rapidly. It is an efficient mechanism for taking $29.99 from your pocket and leaving you with a few pseudo-daring facts that you can trot out at your next cocktail party, even if you misremember the context that Levitt and Dubner only lightly sketched to begin with.

It's very much a bestseller-style book, and exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the form; it will read particularly well on an airplane, and will not cause the reader to change anything, or think deeply about anything, in life after reading it. I enjoyed going through it, but I must admit that I feel faintly used afterwards.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Beautiful Supermachines - The War Against Cliche
via FoxyTunes

The Triumphant Return of Book-A-Day!

OK, this is getting ridiculous. The pile of books that I've read but not written about has now ballooned to twenty-one -- and this after I'd gotten it down to a mere one book (The Magicians by Lev Grossman) at the end of 2009. It's clear I need to do something to shake myself up and keep this particular pile from falling over and killing me.

(The piles of unread books, of course, are much taller, and one of them does regularly threaten to fall on my head. But that's a risk I'm prepared to take.)

So I'm restarting Book-A-Day, though with slightly different rules this time:

1) I will post about a book that I've read every day from today through whenever I give up.

2) I will not necessarily finish reading a book every single day (since I already have a twenty-one book head start), but I expect to read about as many books as there are days, more or less.

3) Many of these books will be comics/manga/graphic novels of one kind or another, as they were the last time around. I don't consider that cheating.

4) Any other reviews I may do (such as my column in Realms of Fantasy) will be in addition to Book-A-Day.

(The first series of Book-A-Day, examined here, ran from July 17, 2006 through February 1, 2007, for a total of 200 days. I make no promises as to how long I'll go this time, but I have the usual male impulse to always better my last "score.")

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Myths of Amazon/Macmillan

There has been a lot of commentary about the Amazon-Macmillan battle over the past week, including a number of statements that I know to be false. So I thought I might as well collect some of them and try to explain, as best I know, what the truth is.

(Once again: I work in publishing, but I'm speaking only for myself here. This is not anyone's official statement.)

Myth 1: All Kindle editions are priced at $9.99.

Truth: Hell no. Amazon's actual promise is "New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases are $9.99, unless marked otherwise." They don't even promise that all bestsellers will be at that price, just that they'll be $9.99...unless they're some other price. Some of those prices are lower, but many are higher.

Particularly when you wander away from the bestseller lists and dig into more specialized titles, Kindle editions have varying prices just like any other kind of book. Looking at the Kindle Business & Investing page -- partially because that's the category I work in these days -- I see some books at $9.99, but a cluster in the $14-$16 range as well.

Amazon has sold the myth of $9.99 ebooks even better than they've sold actual ebooks. But it's not even their own current, consistent strategy.

Myth 2: Macmillan is just doing this to make more money.

Truth: This has been debunked elsewhere, but here are the numbers (roughly accurate, though of course the actual discount percentages that Macmillan gives Amazon are a trade secret which I don't know).

We will assume Albert A. Author's book, Dark Mace of Ake'fujji, is published in hardcover at a list price of $24.95.

Current Scenario: Publisher sells the book to Amazon based on their discount structure. Amazon may get a discount as low as 50%, but I suspect it's more likely to be about 55% (given Amazon's size and strength in the market), so I'll use that figure. Thus Amazon pays $11.25 for each copy of Dark Mace, print or electronic. Assuming Amazon then turns around and sells that Kindle edition for $9.99, the revenue looks like this:
Publisher: $11.25
Amazon: -$1.26

Agency Scenario: Publisher sets the retail price for the e-edition, and we'll assume that is set at $14.99, under the publicly-released terms from Macmillan. Amazon makes the sale and retains 30% of the revenue, passing the other 70% on to the publisher. Thus the revenue looks like this:
Publisher: $10.49
Amazon: $4.50

Thus -- if these numbers are roughly accurate -- the publisher gets about $0.75 less revenue per unit, and Amazon goes from losing a buck and a quarter per book to making $4.50.

(If Amazon is getting a 60% discount, which is possible -- at least on some titles -- they may actually not be losing money in the current regime, but not making money either. In that case, the publisher's revenue would also rise in the new scenario. Still, unless Amazon is already getting discounts within hailing distance of 70% -- and I very much doubt that, except for some particular special circumstances on individual books -- this new model will bring them more money per unit.)

The effect on the publisher's revenue, over a large list, will be negative. The effect on Amazon's revenues will be to turn a large number of small losses into somewhat larger gains.

Myth 3: Amazon makes lots of money selling Kindle hardware, and so keeps e-book prices low to simulate demand for the unit.

Truth: This is half-true; Amazon is deliberately managing the perception that Kindle editions are a great bargain to stimulate increased sales of the hardware. But electronics hardware famously has low margins, and even if Amazon might have had a fairly strong margin before (though that analysis only covers manufacturing costs of the device itself, not overhead or any of the software and connectivity costs), competitive pressures have forced them to drop the price of the unit to $259. If the outside estimates of physical costs are correct -- and I have no way of judging them -- that implies that Amazon has about $75 per unit to pay for Whispernet connectivity, software R&D, and contribution to overhead.

Considering that similarly complicated hardware, video-game consoles, are famously subsidized to sell at below-cost prices, I'd be very surprised if Amazon were making more than a small nominal contribution to overhead on each unit. It's quite possible that they're actually losing money on each unit sold. (There's one analysis of their costs that implies that they are, to the tune of $50 per unit.)

Amazon is actually playing its usual long game: their strategy is to lose a lot of money for extended periods of time to buy overwhelming market share, and then purge inefficiencies and start making profits once the competition is marginalized. (Remember: Amazon started in 1995, and didn't post a quarterly net profit until the holiday season of 2001, racking up more than $3 billion in debt along the way.)

Myth 4: Dynamic pricing is impossible.

Truth: Not at all. Actually, let me just quote what Scott Westerfeld recently wrote on the subject:

Publishers have always delayed lower-priced editions, like paperbacks, until the people who will pay $27 for a shiny new book have coughed up their money. This is not an evil strategy. It’s common with many products—clothing, music, gadgets, prescription medicine—early adopters pay more. Why? Because they’re the ones paying to defray the creation costs. (Which is ME!) Once that’s been done, later adopters can pay less by buying last year’s stuff (and cheap knock-offs). We’ve been lucky in publishing, because we have a physical distinction between what we sell early and late adopters (hardcovers and paperbacks). But this is not a given. In fact, in many industries, the reverse is true. (A later generation iPhone is both cheaper and better. A later, cheaper DVD release often has more extras on it.)

What he said. Or look at the price of the Kindle itself, which dropped from $359 to $259 last year. Consumer prices quite often start high and then drop -- and even, as Westerfeld points out, are cheaper for a better, later product. Even prices for purely digital products can, and have, easily go up and down.

This argument is really just a very thin veil covering "But I want it cheaper than that!"

Myth 5: Amazon has already capitulated.

Truth: The only even semi-public announcement from the Amazon side since this fight began is this self-justifying post by an unnamed member of "The Amazon Kindle team" on a Kindle message board at Amazon on Sunday afternoon. (In contrast to Macmillan's open letter from their CEO, John Sargent, which was released on Saturday morning through Publishers Marketplace.) Many of us took that post to mean that Amazon was admitting that their actions were disproportionate to the offense, and that Macmillan books would soon be back on Amazon.

Well, it's four days later, and that still hasn't happened.

My initial suspicion, on reading that "Amazon Kindle team" message, was that some junior staffer, drunk on Amazon Kool-Aid, was trying to be proactive and helpful but had gotten himself far out ahead of Amazon's actual current corporate position. (I also half-assumed that said junior staffer was quietly canned on Monday; I hope not, but it's possible.) As the week has gone on, I've become more and more convinced.

So I would not suggest that anyone consider that message as indicative of Amazon's current thinking or strategy; it did not look like a carefully considered message and quite likely came from someone not authorized to announce (or make) policy for Amazon.

Myth 6: This involves a company named "McMillan" or "MacMillan" or "Mac Millian."

Truth: Macmillan. The US trade-publishing arm of the von Holztbrinck publishing empire. Not Pan Macmillan (the UK arm of the same octopus), not the Macmillan that was eaten and digested by Simon & Schuster in 1994, not the Macmillan that's part of the educational publisher McGraw-Hill, not Princeton University's MacMillan Group, not the firearm company McMillan Bros., not McMillan and Wife, not Mak Million.

More myths may be added as I think of them.

My previous posts on this subject: Amazon and Macmillan, More on Amazon-Macmillan. Related: A Modest Proposal for E-Book Pricing.

Update, two hours later: Today also brought a second open letter from John Sargent. The box score is now Sargent 2, Bezos 0. Somebody hire Amazon a public relations expert, and fast.

Update 2 (still Feb 4, 2010): Inspired by Conrad's comment, below (which I don't entirely disagree with, though I don't agree with large parts of it as well).

Myth 7: Someone has already won this battle.

Truth: The SFF author community believes that Macmillan has already won. The Kindle boards on Amazon are full of messages crowing about the power of Amazon and the e-book. But this is far from over.

More than that, any resolution is likely to be secret, so there won't be any way to tell who "won" at that point.

And these are two large corporations that are at serious odds over this issue, but also strong long-term partners who will be working extensively with each other for the indefinite future. As John Sargent wrote in his second open letter, "I want to assure you that Amazon has been working very, very hard and always in good faith to find a way forward with us. Though we do not always agree, I remain full of admiration and respect for them. Both of us look forward to being back in business as usual." I don't believe that's just words; that's what publishing and bookselling is about. Like so many others, this is a relationship business, and this issue came out of a serious breakdown in the Amazon-Macmillan relationship. That break can be mended -- it has to be mended, for both parties to continue with their business.

So I'm really saying two things: first, that it's not going to be at all clear to the outside world which one of the parties got more of the things they wanted in this current negotiation, and, second, that this isn't really a case for one party to "win" and the other one "lose."

I was going to write that Macmillan is clearly winning the corporate public relations battle, but that would imply that they're fighting the same battle. Amazon, against all popular wisdom, has kept almost completely silent -- and, as I wrote above, I think the one break in that silence wasn't an official statement to begin with -- and has let their fans do the fighting for them. It's an uncommon strategy these days, when everyone insists that one must get out in front of a story and "frame the narrative," but it's working about as well for them as Macmillan's open letters are working for them.

That's with the general public, though; I suspect that the opinion of Amazon among professional authors has gone way down, and that may open up some serious opportunities for BN.com and Borders.com. Many authors have suddenly seen how much of the online business Amazon controls, and they're uneasy with the use Amazon is willing to make of that control. So a bit of spin-doctoring on Amazon's part might have been very useful to avoid that collateral damage.

But, still: this isn't over yet. And we won't know who won even when it is over. Feel free to keep rooting for whichever side you prefer, though.

Update 3, Lunchtime on Feb 5: The Authors Guild has come through with a new service for all authors, Who Moved My Buy Button.com, which will be tracking the availability (or lack of same) of thousands of books on Amazon. They're also asking for help from authors who see their books' "buy buttons" appear or disappear mysteriously.

Update 4, slightly later in the afternoon on Feb 5:

Myth 8: Any capitulation by Amazon will mean that all ebooks will be priced above $9.99 from now on, alas!

Truth: Actually, Macmillan's proposal is for a sliding scale of e-book prices (similar but not identical to my own, slightly later and only mildly plagiarized Modest Proposal), with a top end of $14.99 and a bottom about $5.99. The details haven't all been released, and, obviously, those are the very details that Macmillan and Amazon are heatedly negotiating at this very moment, so the initial proposal won't be the final result.

But the general outline is clear: higher prices on brand-new books with hardcover editions, with prices dropping from that point as books get older and move into paperback editions. Presumably, books mainly available in mass-market at this point would be at or around that $5.99 mark in electronic form.

This may actually mean that some books would have lower Kindle edition prices than they did before this recent unpleasantness. And, even on the high end, this plan explicitly expects that books will stay at those price points for a limited time. Given the spread, $9.99 might well be the average e-book retail price -- if that average isn't actually lower than that.

But Amazon would no longer be able to sell the newest, most popular hardcover books as $9.99 Kindle editions under the Macmillan plan -- those are the books that would rise in price.

(I had thought this myth was safely dead, but I just read a tweet that implied people still believe it. So I added it to my list.)

Thursdays

I know I'm supposed to say "I never could get the hang of Thursdays," like a good geek, but it simply isn't true.

Thursday is when my meetings finally slow down, after the Tuesday-Wednesday frenzy, and I finally get a chance to look around, get some work done, and maybe even plan instead of just reacting.

So: I think I have gotten the hang of Thursdays, and I like them. Today in particular will be quite productive (I hope!).

Men! The Time of the Required Offering Is Approaching!

If you're a straight man in North America, you already know the terrors of Valentine's Day. It's a deadly holiday, particularly in the earlier stages of a relationship, since there's no way you can possibly be as romantic as your inamorata wishes you would be. (Women will often tell you that they don't expect anything special, and it's even true now and again. But expecting and wanting are two very different things.)

Luckily, I have passed into the ranks of the Old Married Dudes, and can survey your travails from the comfort of my exalted (and tired) position. The most important thing, when it comes to Valentine's Day, is surprise. (It has to be a good surprise, though; very few women respond well to having a bag shoved over their heads and being fake-kidnapped to an outer-borough restaurant. Though the few that do appreciate that are firecrackers. But I digress.)

Some women are easy to surprise. I was lucky enough to marry one of them, and I've already put into place a time-honored plan to surprise her in a way I've done many times before. (Details redacted, just in case she reads this blog for the first time ever.) If you're involved with a woman with a better memory, this may be more difficult.

But you have just over a week to plan, which gives you time to make reservations -- at a restaurant, you and I and every other man in the world knows that you already have the other kind, and always will have -- if necessary and to order whatever physical objects (some women like flowers, some clothing, some a fine set of high-torque wrenches; I don't judge) will be most likely to push her Romance-O-Meter from "OK" up to "WOW."

I can't help with the former, but, for the latter, there is a large online retailer that sells many of those items:

(If you're boycotting that particular large online retailer -- and why shouldn't you? strong moral stances are good for the digestion and blood pressure -- I have to suggest actually heading out into the world to exchange money, and quite possible fatal disease bacilli, with other human beings. That choice, as always, is yours.
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Listening to: The Idle Hands - The 80's Killed Your Boyfriend
via FoxyTunes

Dzur by Steven Brust

Dzur was the tenth of the "Vlad Taltos" novels -- there have been two since, and the plan is for there to be nineteen in all -- and was originally published in 2006. I carefully put it aside on a shelf then, intending to read it with the then-forthcoming next book in the series (Jhegaala) as a potential omnibus for my then-job as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club.

Well, that didn't happen, and so I finally caught up with Dzur recently since I hope to read the just-published twelfth book in the series, Iorich, in a more timely manner.

It's an odd and unlikely thing that any author's most self-referential, writerly, and deliberately overcomplicated series would be his most popular, but that's the case with Brust and the Vlad books; each one is precisely seventeen chapters long, many have complicated structures (as is the case with this one), the entire series has both a meta-story (who is Vlad telling these stories to?) and a deep background (how did this world come to be?) that flourish across the books, and they're not even told in chronological order. The Vlad books, honestly, look like the rare example where a writer works primarily to amuse himself but still finds and keeps a popular audience along the way.

Dzur was a return to the main sequence of the series, following immediately on the events of the previous novel, Issola -- but the next novel, Jhegaala, was then one of the periodic flashback novels, keeping to the general plan that no three straight books in the series can ever be allowed to tell the same story. Dzur also saw the narrator and main character of the series, Vlad Taltos, to return to the city he fled (with a death sentence on his head from his former criminal associates) many books ago.

But, as usual, Dzur isn't about some plot or scheme of Vlad's; Brust's hero is one who is buffeted about by life, not one who makes his own way. Every book in this series is about something that happens to Vlad, rather than about some plan of his that succeeds. For a supposedly super-competent crimelord, Vlad Taltos spends an awful lot of time running away from things, crying for help from his even more powerful friends, and just reacting to events.

Actually, what strikes me every time around is how talky the Vlad books are. There's some action in them, as there would have to be in fantasy stories about a crimelord, but they're absolutely stuffed with scenes in which Vlad talks to people (as well as the scenes in which he walks around, thinking about what he's going to say to or ask someone). Brust is one of the few writers in modern SFF who can stack up against Gene Wolfe in the long, frustrating conversation derby -- with Wolfe, it's because he's releasing the absolute minimum amount of information that he thinks is necessary for the reader to make sense of his plot, but with Brust, it seems to mostly because, if he's mentioned something in any one of the dozen-an-a-half other books set in this fictional world, he doesn't see the need to repeat it again.

So, in Dzur, Vlad comes back to Adrilankha, the center of the Dragaeran Empire -- and of the Jhereg crime organization that has a very large bounty on his head -- and immediately sits down to a big meal with a Dragaeran he just met (and who doesn't figure a whole lot in the rest of the book), which meal, spaced out course-by-course, starts every chapter in this book. After filling up, Vlad decides to try to save his ex-wife from her own mistakes -- as much as he can, which isn't actually all that far, and which does require him to put himself into serious danger. And the rest of Dzur is a series of events -- mostly conversations, as I said, often with the same people (even if, occasionally, they have different names) as Vlad wanders around Adrilankha in semi-disguise.

It's all awfully languid for a major fantasy series; yes, Vlad is in personal danger the entire time he's in Adrilankha, but he's the only one putting himself in danger. And his ex-wife really doesn't want his help. Luckily, Vlad now has a Great Weapon -- there's some power inflation in this series, as in inevitable in any long-running series, but Brust minimizes it by the simple expedient of not having a whole lot of action to begin with -- and that makes him a match for any six or eight opponents. (And Brust then creates tension by reminding us of just how many Jhereg there are in Adrilankha.)

The Vlad books have to come to rely more and more on Vlad's voice, and Brust's writing, as time has gone on. For readers who like that style -- first-person smartass, descended from Zelazny (though, as I said above, there's now threads of Wolfe and plenty of others in the mix, besides the ineffable Brustness) -- it's wonderful to have another dose. But trying to drop into the series at this point, amid all of the smirking and winking about things Brust half-explained six books ago, is not something I'd recommend. Some people like to re-read a series from the beginning in preparation for a new book -- Jo Walton recently did that for this series, in fact -- and I tend to look askance on any new book in a series that can't stand by itself without that kind of aid. But I have to admit that I still enjoy this series a lot, even though it really is designed to be re-read in huge clumps. Brust makes this book entertaining even for readers like me who only half-remember the previous nine books, and I guess that's sufficient.

A Modest Proposal for E-Book Pricing

The question of pricing for electronic books has been very contentious lately, erupting this past weekend into unilateral action by one of the major booksellers in the US against one of the major publishers. Practically every possible model is strongly championed by someone, from "ebooks must always be free" all the way up to "ebooks are actually worth more than the printed books."

So why should I be left out?

My proposal is inspired by Macmillan's sliding scale model, but I've tried to make it simpler and more idiot-proof. (Nothing is entirely idiot-proof; the world always has new and better idiots.)

I propose:

The standard electronically-delivered edition of a book for a wide consumer audience should be priced at xx% of the list price of the currently-dominant print-on-paper edition.

I personally think that the percentage should be about 60%, but reasonable people may differ on this point.

Caveats:

• I said "for a wide consumer audience;" I don't expect this model to be used for professional journals or other publications aimed at a limited or specialist audience.
• A "standard electronically-delivered edition" is assumed to be identical to the print edition; e-books with added fripperies might, possibly, be worth a higher price.
• I am assuming the continued existence of a dominant print-on-paper edition, because I do assume such a thing.

Here's how it would work, given my preferred percentage. (Those who think the percentage should be 20%, or 120%, can do their own math.)

Albert A. Author's new novel, Dark Mace of Ake'fujji, is published in hardcover by Really Big Publishing House in February of 2010 at a list price of $24.95. All of the electronic editions of Dark Mace are available for $14.97.

In December of 2010, RBPH has a book-store promotion for Dark Mace, with stickers that low-paid retail drones affix to the copies they have on hand (and which are pre-applied in RBPH's warehouse to the overstock that they hope to flow out to those stores), dropping the price to $17.95. All of the electronic editions are now $10.77.

RBPH's trade paperback of Dark Mace reaches stores in March of 2011, with a $14.00 list price. The electronic editions drop in price to $8.40.

And, finally, Dark Mace is released as a mass-market paperback in June of 2012 (tying into the slightly-delayed concluding book of the trilogy) with a list price of $8.99. The electronic editions also see a price drop, to $5.39.

This model has the advantage of being consistent and predictable, and of following the already long-established glide path of book pricing. It would be easy for the consumer to understand, and would allow readers to know when a book would be available in the edition they prefer at the price they would like to pay.

For those reasons, I'm morally certain that it will never happen. But I offer it to the world nonetheless.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/30

It's another week, and it brought mail: these are the books that various publishers sent, hoping that I would review them. I may yet do so, but this is not actually a review of those books; I haven't read any of them yet. But I can tell you something about them, from what I can tell from a quick glance and prior knowledge. And, without further ado...

Tom De Haven wrote a novel about Superman -- called, naturally, It's Superman! -- a few years back, and now he's returning to the Big Blue Boy Scout with a non-fictional look at what Superman means to American culture in Our Hero: Superman on Earth. It's part of the "Icons of America" series -- following books by Gore Vidal (on Washington, Adams, and Jefferson), Joseph Epstein (on Fred Astaire), Susan Jacoby (on Alger Hiss), and about a dozen others -- from Yale University Press. So it's somewhere in between an academic monograph for the MLA and a popular history, I guess. Yale is publishing Our Hero on March 2nd in hardcover.

The finale of David Louis Edelman's "Jump 225" trilogy, Geosynchron, is coming from Pyr as a trade paperback on February 9th. And here I have to admit that I still haven't gotten even to the first book in that series, Infoquake, despite having met Edelman several times and even having dinner with him back when my hat read "SF editor." (Speaking of hats, Edelman has been known to rock a particularly awesome hat, and his books should be given a second look if only for that.)

Michael Shea -- author of Nifft the Lean and A Quest for Simbilis and Color out of Time, among a whole bunch of other books -- is back with a new novel from Tor called The Extra. It's a Zeitgeist-y book, I guess -- though it has a premise straight out of a '50s Sheckley novel (and I mean that as a complement) -- with a near-future LA overrun by hyper-real movie productions in which extras are paid hugely well for epic battle scenes...but only if they manage to survive the entirely real carnage. (Which, of course, they hardly ever do.) So see it as the latest version of Sheckley's "The 7th Victim" or The Running Man or Battle Royale or Heroes Die -- a story of "reality TV" run amok and media violence unfettered. Shea's definitely good enough to ring new changes on the idea, and it's an area rife with dramatic possibilities, so I have hopes for this book. The Extras will be published in hardcover tomorrow.

And last for this week is the penultimate book in Steven Erikson's brick-wall of a fantasy series, the Malazan Book of the Fallen -- Dust of Dreams. It actually went on sale on January 19th, and is available in both trade paperback (for most of us) and hardcover (for those who insist of paying more, for whatever reason. I've gotten a book behind on this series -- and, since each book is the length of most authors' trilogies, that's further behind than it looks -- but I still have hopes of catching up with Toll the Hounds and then this book.

Books Read in January

I started 2010 with a pledge to review books immediately after I read them...and now, as I write this on the afternoon of the 30th, I have a stack of sixteen books -- nearly everything I've read this month -- sitting on my printer, still waiting for me to write about them. What's that they say about good intentions?

Well, I've still got a day and a half, to either bulk this post out with quick thoughts or write longer pieces, so let me see what I have to work with:

• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 40 (1/4)
  First Sasuke -- who used to be one of Naruto's friends, way back in the beginning of the series, but has been on a train-with-nasty-villains-so-I-can-get-strong-enough-to-claim-vengeance-on-my-older-brother track for quite a while now -- has a big battle with one of the powerful ninja of the Akatsuki. And then Naruto's mentor, Jiraya, (I've set his name in apposition to differentiate him from Naruto's other mentors) travels to a secret village and discovers some of the secrets of the leader of the Akatsuki, who -- no surprise here to anyone who knows how adventure fiction works -- has a secret connection to Jiraya's own past, and is notably more powerful than anyone suspected. Going into that story, I was assuming Jiraya would be killed to show how powerful Lord Pain is. (And, if you have a name like "Lord Pain," you'd better be a world-class badass, just to keep people from laughing at you.)
• Steven Brust, Dzur (1/4)
  
• Kazuto Okada, Sundome, Vol. 6 (1/5)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 41 (1/6)
  And this volume follows the one above, being almost entirely Jiraya and his frog buddies (I am not kidding) battling Lord Pain. He's not dead as of the end of this one, but I'm still not betting heavily on his survival.
  
• Mark Stein, How the States Got Their Shapes (1/6)
  
• Charlito & Mr. Phil, editors, Awesome 2: Awesomer (1/7)
  
• Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet, Dungeon Parade, Vol. 1: A Dungeon Too Many (1/8)
  
• Jim Massey & Robbi Rodriguez, Maintenance, Vol. 3: Fighting Occupants of Interstellar Craft (1/11)
  
• Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey (1/11)
  
• Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose (1/14)
  Ferguson grew up in Scotland -- you might have noticed his accent -- and recently became a US citizen; he tries to tie the two together in this memoir. Actually, his move to and eventually success in America comes towards the end of this quite entertaining book, and it's more of an afterthought than something central. Like most memoirs, American on Purpose is most engaging and interesting when its subject is young, callow, stupid, and/or doing self-destructive things. Ferguson is an alcoholic who has been dry since the early '90s, so there's quite a lot of self-destructiveness to get through along the way. (Though the book covers his early years in better detail than it does the '80s; looking back at the book, that decade may well seem like a blur to Ferguson at this point, something that he can only make sense of through his documented public work rather than through his own memories.) Ferguson has a Scotsman's charm and vocabulary; he's a great guide through his own life and gets off some excellent passages and thoughts. (Ferguson previously wrote a novel, as well as several produced screenplays; he's a "real writer" as much as he is anything else.) No one ever needs to read a celebrity memoir, but this is an excellent example of the genre, from someone old enough to look back and who did enough in his time worth looking back on.
  
• Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, et. al., Fables, Vol. 12: The Dark Ages (1/14)
  
• Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D., Vol. 11: The Black Goddess (1/15)
  
• Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Superfreakonomics (1/21)
  
• Brian K. Vaughn, et. al., Ex Machina, Vol. 8: Dirty Tricks (1/22)
  
• Dash Shaw, The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century AD (1/25)
  
• Paul Collins, The Book of William (1/25)
  
• Nick Bertozzi, The Salon (1/27)
  
• Ted Rall & Pablo G. Callejo, The Year of Loving Dangerously (1/28)
  
• Alexander Jablokov, Brain Thief (1/28)
  
• Paul Hornschmeier, Mother, Come Home (1/29)

Since my last pledge went so well, I might as well share my new one. Besides trying to work down the giant stacks of comics -- which is always a plan, but rarely a reality -- I'm now trying to alternate genre (SF/Fantasy) books with other books, since I suspect I get more people interested in Dzur and Shades of Grey than in The Book of William and Superfreakonomics. Of course, I'm not promising it will happen -- just saying, in public, that it's my plan.

(Later: well, much more of the weekend of the 30th and 31st got taken up with reading, thinking, and writing about the Amazon/Macmillan affair, and less than expected on writing about the above books. Those titles will turn into links in the near future, but they're not ready yet.)