The Trouble With Amazon — Colin Robinson, co-publisher at OR Books (so perhaps not entirely neutral), on the internet retailer for The Nation:
The accumulated effect of Amazon’s pricing policy, its massive volume and its metric-based recommendations system is, in fact, to diminish real choice for the consumer. Though the overall number of titles published each year has risen sharply, the under-resourcing of mid-list books is producing a pattern that joins an enormously attenuated tail (a tiny number of customers buying from a huge range of titles) to a Brobdingnagian head (an increasing number of purchasers buying the same few lead titles), with less and less in between.
And, on a not unrelated note…
What’s Wrong With Music Business — A fascinating interview with Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, at Wired. I’m usually really skeptical about comparisons between the music industry and book publishing, but there’s lots of good stuff here for book folks:
[T]he premise of technology being the great democratizer and allowing more artists to break through than before — actually, we’ve seen the opposite effect. Fewer artists are breaking than ever before, and fewer artists who are doing it themselves are breaking through than ever before. Back in the early ’80s, when the cellphone was first invented, there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology. Why is that the case? And what can change to open the gates again, to allow artists to break through, whether on their own or with help?… [S]ocial networks have been a really big disappointment in terms of moving the needle in either exposure or sales in any meaningful way. There are a lot of myths in technology that everybody wants to believe, because everybody wants things to get better.
The Little Coincidence That Haunt Your Life — An interview with Alan Moore, author of From Hell, V for Vendetta, Watchmen et al, at The Quietus:
One of the academics at this conference was saying that he was working on a book which was about Watchmen as a post-9/11 text. I can see what he means to a degree. One of my friends over there… said he’d been talking to some people on Ground Zero on September 12, 2001 and he was asking them if they were alright and what it had been like. Two of them, independently of each other, said that they were just waiting for the authorities to find a giant alien sticking half way out of a wall…
…There was that atmosphere of a cataclysmic event happening in New York, which I don’t think had been depicted previously… even in science fiction terms it was perhaps unimaginable! Yes, you do find that a lot of odd, little coincidences like that haunt your life.
Double Take — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and C, discusses Hitchcock, his preoccupation with doubles and the exact meaning of “MacGuffin”, with BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme (via Lee Rourke).
And finally…
Blogs are dying says The Economist. Oh no they’re not, says Cory Doctorow in The Guardian.
The real question, however, is whether Publishers Weekly starting their own blog, PWxyz, is evidence for the prosecution or the defense… (Sorry, that’s a little mean-spirited. It’s great PW have started a blog even if it feels a somewhat belated)…
Have a great weekend.
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