Remember a few weeks back when I mocked Publishers Weekly for using AAP revenue stats to ask the question why fiction sales were down? (It was in a Morning Coffee...Continue reading
Category: DeBunking
A Million Indie Titles Were Published Last Year, and Other Nonsense
There are two frequently repeated misconceptions about the ebook market that continue to be repeated no matter how often they are debunked. The first is that AAP publisher ebook revenue...Continue reading
How to Misuse Stats and Cite Bogus Projections, and Make the Publishing Industry Love You
Another one of those “ebooks didn’t kill print” is being passed around again, and this one is far worse than the dreck we have been seeing about every five months...Continue reading
Millennial Reading Habits Have Changed the Definition of a Classic , and Other Lazy Writing
Millennial-bashing is popular among the media, and this is a problem not just because it’s lazy writing but also because sometimes it distracts from what is actually going on. Quartz,...Continue reading
Republican Congressional Candidate Shamed for Allegedly Writing Bigfoot Erotica
The 2018 election cycle has taken a turn for the obnoxious. There’s a story going around that the candidate for a Congressional district in central Virginia has written about Bigfoot....Continue reading
Forbes Deleted That Ridiculous Anti-Library Piece
On Saturday Forbes published a poorly-researched, badly-argued piece that failed to convince anyone that Amazon Books stores should replace public libraries. According to Quartz, the piece was deleted Monday morning....Continue reading
Updated: Amazon Books Should Replace Local Libraries, and Other Publisher-Serving “Solutions”
Do you know how companies sometimes like to buy editorials that support their position (I see this a lot in the WSJ), or even go so far as to fund...Continue reading
Amazon Claims to Accurately Measure Pages Read in Kindle Unlimited, Neglects to Mention There’s no Standard Page Size
Earlier this week Amazon released a statement tangential to the ongoing problem of cheating in Kindle Unlimited, but as with many of Amazon’s statements the bigger story is what was left...Continue reading
Authors, Don’t Be Taken in by the Blockchain/Bitcoin Hype
If you have been following tech news then you’ve probably heard the term blockchain mentioned more than once. This word is rarely explained in non-technical terms, but it is thrown...Continue reading
Cockygate: Faleena Hopkins Has Registered a Trademark on Cocky, and is Using it to Threaten Other Romance Authors
Trademark bullying is a pox on industries ranging from breweries to whatever over-priced junk Monster Cable is making this week. A trademark bully’s ostensible goal is to keep consumers from...Continue reading
Amazon to Spend a Billion Dollars to License “The Three-Body Problem”?
The Three-Body Problem is one of those books that many people have heard of but few have read. Originally published in Chinese, the English translation of this SF novel won...Continue reading
Major UK Booksellers Throw Up Their Hands When Accused of Selling Far-Right Titles
Remember last year when everyone wrung their hands over Amazon selling Holocaust denial books and completely ignored the fact that you could find those same books in just about every...Continue reading
If eReaders Are Dead Then So Are Film Cameras. And Horse Riding. And Fountain Pens. And Digital Cameras. And Lots of Other Stuff
Last week Tom’s Hardware published a piece which used flawed assumptions to ask whether the ereader was dead: Yes, reading now is a little bit different than it was even...Continue reading
Updated: eBooks are a Stupid Product, and Other Blinkered Ramblings
Lagardère Publishing CEO Arnaud Nourry gave an interview to Scroll.in this weekend that showed both that he was remarkably ignorant about his products as well as how and why consumers value...Continue reading
Edmonton Airport Wastes Money on a Short Story Printer
So the latest hot and trendy bookish gimmick is a receipt printer that has been gussied up as a “vending machine” that prints short stories. This fad is the work...Continue reading