Liveblogging hatereading Book Wars
Oct. 3rd, 2021 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutKindle says I am 13% of the way into this thing, and I’m really questioning how much further I’m going to go. Adoption curves of ebooks have been presented in terms of revenue to trad publishers without any reference to the hub-and-spoke lawsuit and subsequent impacts. Discussion of which books do better as ebooks vs pbooks is predictable (and predictably ignores all kinds of things and for obvious reasons includes zero data from the last year and a half). A senior trade publisher, named “Jane”, first name only which in this book _I think_ means anonymized, but of course it is so tempting to assume it is Jane Friedman (that had better be incorrect!). Anyway, “Jane” describes coffee table / zoom background books vs. books that are actually read (does not characterize it that way), and summarizes that under the term “possession value”. Here it is in all its glory:
“What I mean by this is that some books are the kind of books that a reader wants to have in order to consume the content [me: some books are actually read], and once the content has been consumed the book itself is redundant: the reader has no particular desire to hold on to the book for the sake of it. [Apparently rereading is not a thing?] Jane, a senior trade publisher, described this as “disposable fiction” — the kind of book that “you don’t need to put on your shelf”. On the other hand, there are some books that readers want to own, keep, put on their shelf, return to at a later date, perhaps even display in their living room as a signifier, a symbolic token of who they are and the kinds of books they like and value (or would like others to think that they like and value) [finally, some indication of perspective, hopelessly inadequate tho it feels]. These books have a much higher possession value for the reader. For books with a low possession value, the ebook is ideal: once the content has been consumed, the ebook can be deleted — or simply kept in a digitial collection where it takes up no physical space, only a small amount of memory.”
It goes on to talk about how paper books will last forever even if technology changes, and then display value and so forth.
People really tell you so much about themselves when they talk about other people’s behavior. I’m sure I do, too! And I hope everyone is paying a lot of attention, and that what is coming through is the contempt. Because that is definitely what I am trying to communicate here! I am trying to communicate clearly my contempt for All Of This.
I will say this. _Book Wars_ is definitely the kind of book that once I am done with it, I will delete.
In the meantime!
I often describe pbook lovers as “book huffers”, because the smell experience of books is often one of the first / primary things mentioned that ebooks cannot reproduce. Anyone forced to buy and read musty aged pbooks in order to get at the content that is otherwise unavailable (either because it was the 1980s, or because it hasn’t been made available as an ebook yet) has a lot of opinions about smell-o-vision, and they are not positive.
“…they have a set of aesthetic traits — a beautiful cover, a well-designed interior, a sensuous materiality — that constitute the printed book as something more than simply a conveyor of content, that constitute it as an aesthetic object that is value both for its content and for the material form in which that content is conveyed. “So the real question is going to be: which books do you need to own and which ones can you simply delete”, continued Jane, “and the real trick is going to be figuring out the distinction between the disposable books and the ones you want to keep on your shelf.”
Or, you know, you could buy and frame prints of the covers, or buy actual sculptures as art, or maybe have a plant.
Or, if you’re me, you can buy a lot of lego with the newly freed up space.
It’s so weird that this author chose to use Andy Weir and _The Martian_ for the change in how fiction got published in the transition to Our New World of self pub / ebooks. The dates on first self-pub and movie release for _The Martian_ and _Fifty Shades of Grey_ are super comparable, and while the box on _The Martian_ is bigger, the box on the Grey series is bigger (and the budget on the first movie enough lower than box - budget is a bigger number on the Grey series). I doubt anyone who is familiar with _The Martian_ has failed to hear of Grey, and the reverse is _absolutely not the case_. It’s an open question about the name recognition of James vs. Weir.
And when I say “weird”, I mean, relentlessly sexist. The author repeatedly returns to the thesis that ebooks were expected initially to be primarily read by “businessmen [sec] reading business books on their digital devices”.
And the treatment of romance as a category with the largest turnover is dismissive, to say the least. I’ve already included plenty of quotes that display in vivid detail the attitude towards popular fiction (and the total failure to appreciate how common rereading is in popular fiction). What I haven’t necessarily been able to show clearly is how _every_ _single_ _time_ there is an opportunity to choose between a woman author and a man author, or between romance and literally any other genre, this moron makes the wrong choice. But you know, all I really needed to do was turn another page:
“When subscription libraries did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by men reading collections of sermons in their bookrooms, and more by ladies reading gothic novels in their closets.”
Oh, wait, time machine settings wrong there. Let’s try that again.
“When ebooks did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by businessmen reading business books in airport lounges and more by women reading romance novels on their Kindles (most romance readers are women).”
That’s fine. We know what happened to the collections of sermons. In this author’s world, those collections of sermons were read like this:
“Many business and economics books are not the kind of books that you would typically read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience: they are more likely to be books that you would read more slowly and even discontinuously, where you may want to move back and forth in the text in order to remind yourself of the information provided or points made earlier in the text. They are also books that you may want to come back to at a later point, consult again and use more like a reference work than a book that could be quickly read and then discarded. These features would suggest that business and economics books would perform more like self-help books and family and relationship books than fiction, and this is indeed what has happened.”
There’s an _entire_ _market_ in summaries of business books so that people don’t need to read the business book at all. The number of book buyers and readers who consume business and economics books in the manner described is not large enough to inspire hope in a publishing industry that intends to stay large. Also, I’ve read a lot of business and economics books, and generally speaking, I read them in a pretty linear fashion, primarily interrupted by liveblogging hatereading. And if there is one thing that doing that has exposed, it is that people read books by people like Piketty roughly like they read books by Pynchon, which is to say, not past page 35 or 50 or so. Piketty is a gold bug, and you don’t have to read much of Capital in the whatever the fuck to realize that, and it’s a _pretty fucking salient feature_ of PIketty. And yet nowhere does anyone ever talk about that, from which I conclude that everyone would rather display the book and drop the name than actually engage with the ideas in his books.
I am not entirely certain how anyone thinks it makes them look clever to signify with this type of book display that they are the sort of person who displays books without having any basic idea of the contents, but I will note that it makes it super easy to spot them.
Things do improve a bit later: “Self-publishing is the submerged continent that could, if we were ever to know its true extent, put all of our calculations so far in a very different light.” So, you know, that’s a _degree_ of backing away from the hubristic, large trad pub data focus. He even finally acknowledges United States vs Apple (which was conspicuously _NOT_ acknowledged in the adoption curve data):
“When this requirement expired in 2014, all the large trade publishers moved to full agency agreements, which meant that they set the prices of ebooks within agreed bands and retailers were no longer allowed to discount. This meant that new ebooks from the large trade publishers were — especially from 2014 on — typically selling at much higher prices than self-published ebooks.”
Even more: “Indeed, it could be that some of the decline we see in traditional publishers’ ebook sales in certain categories, like romance and mystery, attests not to an overall decline in ebook sales but rather to a revenue flight from traditional publishers to self-publishers, as readers migrate from higher-priced ebooks published by traditional publishers…” He says he’s gonna come back to this; I’m not sure I’ll be there for it.
There is just one helluva story about the person who developed Byliner:
“John was also a heavy reader, but many of the books he bought and stacked up on his nightstand were books that he never read: reading a book was a seven- or eight- or ten-day commitment, and he simply didn’t have the time to read them all.”
No. No. No. John is not a heavy reader. John _thinks_ he is a heavy reader. Maybe the author of this book agrees. John is not a heavy reader. John is a middle-range reader. He’s reading on the order of 50 books a year. A _heavy_ reader is a 1-2 book a day reader.
Come on, people. What is wrong with you. This is your business. Shouldn’t you know it better than this?
*sigh* He just called Laura Hazard Owen Laura Owen, and quoted her saying she “purred”.
I’d better never meet this author in person.
The Atavist Books description has some interesting observations. First, that they could not get book reviewers to look at anything that did not have a print edition. That has been observed by tons of self-pubbed authors over the years, but typically attributed to being authors who have not yet made a name for themselves with trad pub and/or other than lit fic authors. But this happened _with_ lit fic, name authors. Basically, the reason book discovery is so hard for ebooks is because the lit fic review community wouldn’t / wont? Touch it. Interesting! I think those fuckers are uniformly evil anyway, so I don’t really care.
Second, the authors they were approaching were death on ebook first print later for anything. _Really_ interesting! I had not anticipated that.
The interaction between the Byliner story (Very short books for full-length ebook prices! Who wouldn’t want to pay for that.) and the Atavist story is also interesting for this quote, “You’re doing these little books and people think they shouldn’t be paying anything for them.”
I often run into people whose theory of pricing is different than mine (basically: everyone). Mine is simple: the correct price is the price agreed upon by a willing buyer and a willing seller. Sellers usually think that it should be the price they think it should be. Buyers, usually think that it should be the price they think it should be. Since you need both for a transaction, I feel like wherever they meet is The Price. Doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me, however, no one likes it. This quote is a perfect, Seller Price Theory perspective on the problem.
The discussion of book-as-app is interesting, and it is interesting to think about game publishing, app publishing, book publishing ultimately all winding up in similar space, with similar structures. The author thinks that book schedules / review community / wtf is special, but game publishing has parallel structures. I don’t really know which one is more exploitative and chaotic — they both have a lot more people who want to work in them than there are slots, thus pushing salaries down across the board, which can be helpful in terms of cost containment.
Nice, detailed profile of Touch Press / The Elements and subsequent failure to commodify that initial success. If this entire book were like this profile, it wouldn’t be much of a book, but it wouldn’t be irritating.
“What I mean by this is that some books are the kind of books that a reader wants to have in order to consume the content [me: some books are actually read], and once the content has been consumed the book itself is redundant: the reader has no particular desire to hold on to the book for the sake of it. [Apparently rereading is not a thing?] Jane, a senior trade publisher, described this as “disposable fiction” — the kind of book that “you don’t need to put on your shelf”. On the other hand, there are some books that readers want to own, keep, put on their shelf, return to at a later date, perhaps even display in their living room as a signifier, a symbolic token of who they are and the kinds of books they like and value (or would like others to think that they like and value) [finally, some indication of perspective, hopelessly inadequate tho it feels]. These books have a much higher possession value for the reader. For books with a low possession value, the ebook is ideal: once the content has been consumed, the ebook can be deleted — or simply kept in a digitial collection where it takes up no physical space, only a small amount of memory.”
It goes on to talk about how paper books will last forever even if technology changes, and then display value and so forth.
People really tell you so much about themselves when they talk about other people’s behavior. I’m sure I do, too! And I hope everyone is paying a lot of attention, and that what is coming through is the contempt. Because that is definitely what I am trying to communicate here! I am trying to communicate clearly my contempt for All Of This.
I will say this. _Book Wars_ is definitely the kind of book that once I am done with it, I will delete.
In the meantime!
I often describe pbook lovers as “book huffers”, because the smell experience of books is often one of the first / primary things mentioned that ebooks cannot reproduce. Anyone forced to buy and read musty aged pbooks in order to get at the content that is otherwise unavailable (either because it was the 1980s, or because it hasn’t been made available as an ebook yet) has a lot of opinions about smell-o-vision, and they are not positive.
“…they have a set of aesthetic traits — a beautiful cover, a well-designed interior, a sensuous materiality — that constitute the printed book as something more than simply a conveyor of content, that constitute it as an aesthetic object that is value both for its content and for the material form in which that content is conveyed. “So the real question is going to be: which books do you need to own and which ones can you simply delete”, continued Jane, “and the real trick is going to be figuring out the distinction between the disposable books and the ones you want to keep on your shelf.”
Or, you know, you could buy and frame prints of the covers, or buy actual sculptures as art, or maybe have a plant.
Or, if you’re me, you can buy a lot of lego with the newly freed up space.
It’s so weird that this author chose to use Andy Weir and _The Martian_ for the change in how fiction got published in the transition to Our New World of self pub / ebooks. The dates on first self-pub and movie release for _The Martian_ and _Fifty Shades of Grey_ are super comparable, and while the box on _The Martian_ is bigger, the box on the Grey series is bigger (and the budget on the first movie enough lower than box - budget is a bigger number on the Grey series). I doubt anyone who is familiar with _The Martian_ has failed to hear of Grey, and the reverse is _absolutely not the case_. It’s an open question about the name recognition of James vs. Weir.
And when I say “weird”, I mean, relentlessly sexist. The author repeatedly returns to the thesis that ebooks were expected initially to be primarily read by “businessmen [sec] reading business books on their digital devices”.
And the treatment of romance as a category with the largest turnover is dismissive, to say the least. I’ve already included plenty of quotes that display in vivid detail the attitude towards popular fiction (and the total failure to appreciate how common rereading is in popular fiction). What I haven’t necessarily been able to show clearly is how _every_ _single_ _time_ there is an opportunity to choose between a woman author and a man author, or between romance and literally any other genre, this moron makes the wrong choice. But you know, all I really needed to do was turn another page:
“When subscription libraries did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by men reading collections of sermons in their bookrooms, and more by ladies reading gothic novels in their closets.”
Oh, wait, time machine settings wrong there. Let’s try that again.
“When ebooks did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by businessmen reading business books in airport lounges and more by women reading romance novels on their Kindles (most romance readers are women).”
That’s fine. We know what happened to the collections of sermons. In this author’s world, those collections of sermons were read like this:
“Many business and economics books are not the kind of books that you would typically read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience: they are more likely to be books that you would read more slowly and even discontinuously, where you may want to move back and forth in the text in order to remind yourself of the information provided or points made earlier in the text. They are also books that you may want to come back to at a later point, consult again and use more like a reference work than a book that could be quickly read and then discarded. These features would suggest that business and economics books would perform more like self-help books and family and relationship books than fiction, and this is indeed what has happened.”
There’s an _entire_ _market_ in summaries of business books so that people don’t need to read the business book at all. The number of book buyers and readers who consume business and economics books in the manner described is not large enough to inspire hope in a publishing industry that intends to stay large. Also, I’ve read a lot of business and economics books, and generally speaking, I read them in a pretty linear fashion, primarily interrupted by liveblogging hatereading. And if there is one thing that doing that has exposed, it is that people read books by people like Piketty roughly like they read books by Pynchon, which is to say, not past page 35 or 50 or so. Piketty is a gold bug, and you don’t have to read much of Capital in the whatever the fuck to realize that, and it’s a _pretty fucking salient feature_ of PIketty. And yet nowhere does anyone ever talk about that, from which I conclude that everyone would rather display the book and drop the name than actually engage with the ideas in his books.
I am not entirely certain how anyone thinks it makes them look clever to signify with this type of book display that they are the sort of person who displays books without having any basic idea of the contents, but I will note that it makes it super easy to spot them.
Things do improve a bit later: “Self-publishing is the submerged continent that could, if we were ever to know its true extent, put all of our calculations so far in a very different light.” So, you know, that’s a _degree_ of backing away from the hubristic, large trad pub data focus. He even finally acknowledges United States vs Apple (which was conspicuously _NOT_ acknowledged in the adoption curve data):
“When this requirement expired in 2014, all the large trade publishers moved to full agency agreements, which meant that they set the prices of ebooks within agreed bands and retailers were no longer allowed to discount. This meant that new ebooks from the large trade publishers were — especially from 2014 on — typically selling at much higher prices than self-published ebooks.”
Even more: “Indeed, it could be that some of the decline we see in traditional publishers’ ebook sales in certain categories, like romance and mystery, attests not to an overall decline in ebook sales but rather to a revenue flight from traditional publishers to self-publishers, as readers migrate from higher-priced ebooks published by traditional publishers…” He says he’s gonna come back to this; I’m not sure I’ll be there for it.
There is just one helluva story about the person who developed Byliner:
“John was also a heavy reader, but many of the books he bought and stacked up on his nightstand were books that he never read: reading a book was a seven- or eight- or ten-day commitment, and he simply didn’t have the time to read them all.”
No. No. No. John is not a heavy reader. John _thinks_ he is a heavy reader. Maybe the author of this book agrees. John is not a heavy reader. John is a middle-range reader. He’s reading on the order of 50 books a year. A _heavy_ reader is a 1-2 book a day reader.
Come on, people. What is wrong with you. This is your business. Shouldn’t you know it better than this?
*sigh* He just called Laura Hazard Owen Laura Owen, and quoted her saying she “purred”.
I’d better never meet this author in person.
The Atavist Books description has some interesting observations. First, that they could not get book reviewers to look at anything that did not have a print edition. That has been observed by tons of self-pubbed authors over the years, but typically attributed to being authors who have not yet made a name for themselves with trad pub and/or other than lit fic authors. But this happened _with_ lit fic, name authors. Basically, the reason book discovery is so hard for ebooks is because the lit fic review community wouldn’t / wont? Touch it. Interesting! I think those fuckers are uniformly evil anyway, so I don’t really care.
Second, the authors they were approaching were death on ebook first print later for anything. _Really_ interesting! I had not anticipated that.
The interaction between the Byliner story (Very short books for full-length ebook prices! Who wouldn’t want to pay for that.) and the Atavist story is also interesting for this quote, “You’re doing these little books and people think they shouldn’t be paying anything for them.”
I often run into people whose theory of pricing is different than mine (basically: everyone). Mine is simple: the correct price is the price agreed upon by a willing buyer and a willing seller. Sellers usually think that it should be the price they think it should be. Buyers, usually think that it should be the price they think it should be. Since you need both for a transaction, I feel like wherever they meet is The Price. Doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me, however, no one likes it. This quote is a perfect, Seller Price Theory perspective on the problem.
The discussion of book-as-app is interesting, and it is interesting to think about game publishing, app publishing, book publishing ultimately all winding up in similar space, with similar structures. The author thinks that book schedules / review community / wtf is special, but game publishing has parallel structures. I don’t really know which one is more exploitative and chaotic — they both have a lot more people who want to work in them than there are slots, thus pushing salaries down across the board, which can be helpful in terms of cost containment.
Nice, detailed profile of Touch Press / The Elements and subsequent failure to commodify that initial success. If this entire book were like this profile, it wouldn’t be much of a book, but it wouldn’t be irritating.